


Vandal's SCP Graveyard ("Being Human")

by thefriendlyvandal



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Child Abuse, Homophobia, Oh You Know(tm), Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 04:09:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12786666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefriendlyvandal/pseuds/thefriendlyvandal
Summary: See "Introduction" for complete explanation.





	1. Introduction

Between 2015 and now (late 2017), I was working on a large SCP Project/series called "Being Human".

I've decided to quit writing SCP, and have therefore decided to post everything I had- be it artwork, notes, or yes, writing- here for anyone who wants to see it. A few additional things:

-This work was originally labeled as explicit due to the content of "Rituals", which is Clef's associated tale that describes his rape and molestation in graphic detail. When I was writing this, I grappled with the contents of this work for a long time, because it disturbed me. I was going to post it with redaction on the main site. This is how I will be posting it here, also, although anyone who has been close enough to read the drafts of this particular piece will know how far it went.

-This compilation is rough, but I'm not writing another word of it. Sentences will leave off suddenly. Things will be dropped, unpolished, unfinished; dates are wrong and uncertain. The portion of this work written during NaNoWriMo is especially rough.

-[Major Tom](http://www.scp-wiki.net/your-circuits-dead-theres-something-wrong) was the first work in this series. It will remain on the site as a stand-alone work, but is the only finished piece available.

 

The series hub for this tale was going to be [this page](http://scpsandbox2.wikidot.com/thefriendlyvandalhuman), which I coded, as you can see, on the SCP sandbox. It describes the premise of this series and is very important to note. On this page is listed all that I intended to write, plus or minus some.

 

The works I will be posting here will be prefaced by a brief introduction about each.

Thank you.

 

UPDATE AS OF 1/21/2018: I'm back on SCP and in a healthier state of mind lmao. Please ignore all the teenage angst in my author's notes on here. I have a much healthier relationship with the Foundation now, but that being said, I'm not quite sure if I'll pick this one back up to put it on the site yet. Meh. 


	2. Rituals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE AS OF FEBRUARY 2018: I've been thinking about this tale a lot recently, and I might end up reworking what I have here into a site tale somewhere down the line. In the meantime, enjoy, and read with caution. There are a lot of errors in this text still.

# 

# 1

 

 

> Lanthanide Hills Training Facility (Site-19 premises)
> 
> Lyakhovsky Islands, Northern Siberia

“Andrea Adams…”

Clef’s eyes drift up from the thick packet of paperwork in front of him to his assistant, who sits sprawled in a chair in front of his battered desk.

“…Getting married…” He repeats slowly.

“Look, just…sign off on it, okay?” Adams rolls her eyes, dreading the response to this, and sure enough her mentor breaks into a massive shit-eating grin. It’s not everyday you get to poke fun at your assistant’s personal life.

“…In  _France_.”

“It’s romantic. Not that you would know anything about that.”

Clef looks back at the sabbatical paperwork, holding it up dramatically and squinting at the fine print.

“…In  _Paris_.”

“You can really just sign off on it.”

“…travelling Europe for your honeymoon…”

“No really, please, don’t let me stop you. I just need the signature.”

Clef kicked back in his chair, leafing through the paperwork carefully. “I don’t know.” He drawled loudly. “I could just keep you here. Five month's leave is quite a stretch to do everything on my own. Have plenty of paperwork, and besides, I’m sure you know,” he gestured to the reinforced window behind him, providing a refreshing view of the endless, barren landscape of Camp Lanthanide. “Siberia really is nice in winter. What with the five months of darkness and all. You ever read  _The Shining_?  _30 Days Of Night_? Oh!  _One Day In The Life Of Ivan Ivanovich_? You know, you could just bring her here. Very romantic.”

 

 

> September 20th, 2016
> 
> T-24 days to Site-19 winter lockdown

“I know you would rather live in Florida.” Adams was thoroughly examining her nails. “You don’t need to keep telling me every time you look outside. Just sign the damn release.”

“Well, I won’t with that attitude. When’s the wedding?”

“What does it matter to you?”

“Well, I’d hate to miss it.”

Clef reveled in her brief and poorly hidden expression of ungodly horror.

“…Doesn’t matter.” She finally says.

“It matters if you want to get this signed.” Clef quiped.

Andrea hesitated, then sighed.

“…November 3rd.”

Clef made eye contact with her for a long moment before slowly opening a desk drawer to retrieve a pen. She groaned as he wrote it down on a post it stuck to the side of his desk.

“That’ll do, agent. Here.” Clef dropped the thick stack of forms onto his desk with a dull  _thwump_. Adams raised an unamused eyebrow.

“…Aren’t you gonna sign it?”

“Oh, I did this morning.” Clef continued grinning, opening up his email on the desktop computer with a passive wave of his hand. “Now get the hell out of my office.”

Andrea smiled genuinely, stood, took the packet from his desk, and closed the door behind her on her way out, and it was in this manner that he saw her for the last time in one piece.

 

 

> Time until Site-19 disaster:
> 
> 103 days

 

* * *

# 2

 

 

> "And people always ask me, when I tell them this statistic [that 99% of type greens will progress to stage 4 of their condition within their lifetime], ‘What about the others?’ or ‘What about the 1% that don’t?’ and that’s the primary concern I’m seeking to address today. The Ichabod Campaign is a hard thing to come to terms with for many people studying Hume Theory behind the curtain.
> 
> It’s important to note when addressing these things that contrary to popular belief, type greens were not prematurely killed until recently. For a long time the industry standard was to only seek out type greens when they had caused something to draw attention to themselves to necessitate their being killed; the sudden disappearance of someone important, for example, or a string of murders with little causation attached, which would be completed with a chaotic and unorganized hunting mission usually described as a ‘witch hunt’. It wasn’t until the development of Hume theory and subsequent primitive Kant Counters in the late 1950s that it became possible to determine and quantify the disposition of power in certain individuals, and it wasn’t until the Global Occult Coalition launched the Icharod Extermination Campaign in the early 1970s that it became the norm to seek out and destroy these individuals as they came about into the world.
> 
> The Ichabod Campaign was a logical next step with the development of long-range and more accurate Kant devices. I don’t blame the industry for taking that turn, especially when it seemed like such a damn perfect solution to such a damaging problem. If you could prevent a type green from entering the phase 4 power stage, you could also prevent the type green from entering the phase 2 power stage and all the precarious testing of boundaries that came with it; why wouldn’t you? To outsiders it would sound like something along the lines of genocide, but it was different behind the curtain where you could see the damaging effects these individuals could cause (keyword _could_ ).
> 
> It was this kind of thinking that kept the Foundation from immediately lashing out to shut down this campaign. We didn’t agree with it, and we didn’t condone it, either. It would be a lie to say that we never initiated individual missions to kill certain individuals prematurely, but we never launched a movement on such scale and with such force as Ichabod, and we didn’t protest it either, because the thing about Ichabod was that it was _effective._ Ethical? Moral? Both are in the eye of the beholder, but damages caused by type greens of all power levels and abilities dropped dramatically in the 1970s onward, and we turned a blind eye to it. There would be people always saying _why the hell didn’t you stop it, because had it not been type greens you would have used every resource in your possession to stop that campaign before it got off the ground,_ and that’s true, but it was becuase type green attacks and level changes before Ichabod were so deadly and damaging to the outside that it was overlooked.
> 
> It’s like this: Why don’t animal rights activists speak out against people using mousetraps in their homes? Because mice have been pests for centuries. They’ve caused countless deaths through disease and they cause damage to the building. The same people will speak out against their being used in research because of it’s apparent unethical standard, and yet won’t speak out against them being senselessly slaughtered via suffocation. We don’t even know if the mice their killing deserve to be killed, or if they’re just babies, and we don’t care, because if we were to let mice roam around our homes in large numbers it would be catastrophic. And the same thing is with type greens; people speak against their containment, the use of them in studies regarding psychic ability and Hume theory, in Kant counter tests, but most of all they speak out against the mutilation of their bodies for [REDACTED], a practice that remains common today.
> 
> But no one spoke against Ichabod. And so, Ichabod never stopped. It’ll be reaching its 30th anniversary this year. The average Ichabod agent has about 100-150 kills under their belt over the course of their career; the average Ichabod strike team can have anywhere from 300-500. The reality is that containing every type green would be impossible because type greens are more common than it’s usually let on.
> 
> The next question commonly asked is _then what about SCP-239? What makes her so special?_ And the answer is that 239 was contained by a former Ichabod agent passing by. He worked for the Foundation and would have killed her, openly stated that he would have killed her on-sight if oversight hadn’t stepped in to the situation. She’s here for testing. She’s here to make a better world, but she isn’t special. The average lifespan of a type green is 17 years old, because they most often reach stage 4 at around 16. 239 was born in 2003 and has been in stage 3 for 4 years as of writing. Maybe she’ll be part of the 1%, a perfect case study as to how containing and raising these children in an environment that gives them clear boundaries and expectations for them while allowing them a safe environment to explore their abilities has significant impact on how they develop as adults. Maybe she’ll enter stage 4 and destroy us all. It’s hard to tell, but as of now she’s a relatively normal teenager developing under the child care plan so painstakingly set out for her upon her arrival. She’s had her good days and her bad days, but she’s never caused permanent damage, and it’s important to note here that _this_ is the hope for anomalous children in containment; healthy development with exception of concurrent abilities. Maybe someday the care plans being developed for her and other type greens that enter containment or foundation watch will become the norm, and will lead to the end of the Icharod program.
> 
> But for now, the statistics are startling: the GOC Richard Extermination Campaign kills nearly half of all type greens. In it’s heyday in the 80s, it killed nearly 75%, but regulations have tightened since then. The lifespan of a type green “in the wild”, referring to greens not being affected, tracked, or protected by a GoI, is around 13- around the same age that these individuals often induce their own demise by entering stage 4 of development.
> 
> In the 1980s, the average lifespan was 8 years old, because this was the age that Ichabod often found and killed them."
> 
> -[REDACTED]

* * *

 

 

STRIKE TEAM FINNEGAN (“SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND”)

RADIO CODE: FINNEGAN

DEPLOYED: 1981

**ICHABOD EXTERMINATION CAMPAIGN**

 

CODE NAME: “PEPPER”

SERIAL NUMBER 02239475-GOLDEN-TRIPLET

COMMAND OPERATIVE: COMMAND CLASS 3

PRIMARY SKILLSET: SQUAD LEADER

 

CODE NAME: “PIANO”

SERIAL NUMBER 03245834-CRIMSON-DOUBLE

SPECIAL OPERATIVE: HUNTER CLASS 8

PRIMARY SKILLSET: SNIPER

 

CODE NAME: “GUITAR”

SERIAL NUMBER 03219384-PERIWINKLE-SINGLET

SPECIAL OPERATIVE: HUNTER CLASS 3

PRIMARY SKILLSET: SNIPER

 

CODE NAME: “UKULELE”

SERIAL NUMBER 09976657-COBALT-TRIPLET

SPECIAL OPERATIVE: HUNTER CLASS 4

PRIMARY SKILLSET: TRACKER

 

CODE NAME: “TRUMPET”

SERIAL NUMBER 03294175-MAROON-LAMBDA

SPECIAL OPERATIVE: MEDIC CLASS 3

PRIMARY SKILLSET: DISPOSAL

* * *

 

# Arizona 1985

 

The 1969 Volkswagen van the five of them have been inhabiting for the past four years has taken an admirable amount of damage in said timeframe. It’s traveled far and wide and has held warm and cold bodies; the doors are still on their hinges and the muffler is taped on. There are no special holding areas for weapons- what they have is thrown in a plastic tub in the back, taped to the interior, easily grabbed by gloved hands in early mornings, a conglomeration, a casual action, last person there gets the machete and that was that- no different then miners going to the dark pits of the earth to return by morning, battered, maybe ever so slightly changed. It’s poetically non-poetic, really, all things considered, and that was the job they had.

Pepper is driving. The car is wheezing at 90 miles an hour down a highway with the occasional lone streetlight flashing overhead, but mostly it’s only the headlights and the sand from the dunes flowing in thin sheets over the asphalt. It’s 3am. They’ve been driving for less than five minutes, wired on adrenaline in silence, but it feels like longer. When the Kant counter stops clicking, fingers gripping guns with white knuckles and shuddering breaths in the cool desert night find that it’s now passed into time that can be counted by the second, like counting time between thunder and lightning, _one mississippi_ with the dark road echoing out behind the back window when Ukelele glances back to see it over the dark silhouette of Guitar’s hair, _two mississippi,_ breath catching and bullets forming a heavyweight in his shotgun the five of them have driven into fully open desert so that only the cacti and dunes can see them, _three mississippi, four mississippi, five-_

“I think we lost it,” announces Pepper from the driver’s seat. He keeps the car at 90 because his mind believes it but his body doesn’t. Ukulele takes note that this announcement takes the time that the regular _mississippi_ would fill, so they are now six seconds out. The Kant counter’s strange little gauge bounces it’s needle at normal, and to verify that they aren’t mistaken, _six mississippi, seven mississippi, eight mississippi_ is taken up by Trumpet lighting up a match and crouching awkwardly in his seat to hold it up to the counter mounted via duct tape to one wall of the car. It casts a ghostly light over the meter.

Zero. Ukulele watches the match start to burn down.

At _nine mississippi,_ the needle bounces with the road and stays a little above normal.

At _ten mississippi,_ the needle crawls ever so slightly higher just as the match burns out and they see the fireball rocketing down the dark highway towards the van.

**KTE-6453-ORANGE**

Guitar sees it, too- an important interruption of his fight against the blood soaking his shirt and dripping onto the floor- and there’s no time to yell out, so in half a _mississippi_ Ukulele drops his shotgun and violently grabs the back of his shirt and yanks him into the belly of the van, away from the back door-

_THUDKSSHHSKREEE_

In another half a _mississippi,_ the fireball hits the van back door square on target and sends the window shattering inwards towards Trumpet, still crouched awkwardly on the seat during the impact, which throws the car forward ten feet on the dark highway, wheels screeching for traction. Pepper swears over the sound of the agent being thrown off the seat onto the floor, and Ukulele hits the floor, too, colliding with Guitar on the hard metal. In the brief illumination by the tongues of fire snaking through the shattered glass onto the ceiling, he can make out the shape of his shotgun clattering forwards towards one of the compartments, out of reach.

**CODENAME: “ROAD RUNNER”**

Ukulele stops keeping track of the time.

Trumpet shakes off the daze from the collision and instead lurches his body awkwardly towards the back of the van, where his hunting rifle sits in the communal weapons bin, destructive-end up, fully loaded. If they were in a less dangerous profession the five of them might consider further protection then ten or eleven guns and knives tossed in a container with only the safety pins holding back a domino-like rampage of fire in such a small enclosed space, but sometimes you had to make do, and it pays off when all Trumpet has to do to return fire is yank out the rifle, flip off the safety, and shove the muzzle out the broken window, using the metal part of the back door to shield his body. Trumpet is a medic, not a hunter, but then again he doesn’t need to be good to cause a little distraction. Ukulele lets go of Guitar’s shirt and is about to grab his shotgun from under the seat when the Harley Davidson motorcycle comes into full view behind them, flooding the broken window with harsh LED light.

The fireball was to slow them down, not to hurt them.

Trumpet is out of bullets. He pulls down on the trigger a few more times, breath coming fast and hard, but the gun is empty and the KTE on a motorcycle less than five feet off their bumper is unscathed. He yanks the barrel back in the van and discards it on the floor. Ukulele is about to grab hold of his shotgun when everything violently turns to the left and it slides out of reach again; Pepper has spun the wheel on the van 180 degrees and the van turned with it, up on two wheels, rubber scraping on sand grains and losing traction on desert wind. The Harley turns with much more grace, less swearing, and fewer cries of pain and surprise.

Guitar is completely unconscious now, body limp on the floor of the van. Trumpet remembers his actual job and also takes sudden note of the gash on Guitar’s side, and instead of reaching towards the med kit reaches into the bottom of the gun bucket, shifting through knives and scattered loose bullets until he finds a roll of duct tape.

“She’s coming up on our side, boys!” Yells Pepper from the driver’s seat. Ukulele gives up on the shotgun and whips around to Trumpet, attempting to keep his head below the window, clutching the tape with one hand and the floor with the other.

“Hand me that- that thing!”

Trumpet grabs the second shotgun in their possession and begins to pull it out, and Ukulele gives out a strangled cry of frustration that makes him drop it back into the bin before the butt can even clear the sides.

“No! No!” He yells. “The _motherfucker!”_

Trumpet yanks the semi automatic machine gun from the mix. Ukulele fumbles over the seat and takes it from the other man by the barrel, then whips back around, takes a deep breath, and slides open the side door on the dark desert sand. Trumpet takes Guitar by the arms and drags him to the back of the van, where the rips off a piece of duct tape with his teeth and begins fumbling around for the wound itself in the dark, hands sticky and slippery with blood.

Ukelele had opened the door on a demon in red.

She had obviously put all her powers into her bike first, maybe in the first couple stages, before she had become god. The bike was just a little blacker than was possible with paint, the reds just a little brighter than natural in the night. Little things. Tiny things.

Harmless things.

He didn’t put much more thought into it. Ukulele flipped the safety off the machine gun and opened fire on the teenager on the motorcycle in the other lane, filling the world with sparks and and hate and flying bullet casings. It surprised her- maybe she wasn’t expecting such a punch- but she deflected them easily, skin healing, bullets missing, a flurry of gold light and headlights on open road.

He felt pity for her as they approached the intersection they had been driving towards, another lone streetlamp in an endless desert on a remote highway. She was racing them because her heart was made for racing. She had wanted to go fast, always faster, always just a bit farther than the rest, maybe had started with street racing, maybe wanted to feel more, powerful-

It always came down to power, didn’t it?

Ukulele continued firing as she pulled ahead of them, inch by inch, Pepper breaking, the KTE speeding. Careening towards the light posts, one on either side, Ukelele could just make out the ever so slight sheen of stainless steel strung between them, just as the van screeched to a shuddering halt and the red blur sped by.

Agent Piano didn’t even need to raise his gun from where he sat waiting in the dust on the side of the road. The neck-level wire did the whole job for them.

* * *

 

# regarding photographs

When Francis Wojciechoski start hating his body?

Did it happen all at once? He thinks it was a long time coming, the first reaction when the swelling went down and he started to feel the pain through the dull numbness. Gas station mirrors and puddles by the side of the road. Never thought much of how he looked, but now he hates it, hates, hates, hates it because now his body was hers, hates it because that was the body that she liked, that she touched, that she owned. Was it ever his? He wonders. Dark nights in a rattling van laying awake as the others slept in their mottled kevlar and guns at arms reach, he feels it, feels it, phantom hands and manicured fingernails and he thinks that was when he started changing his appearance.

_I want to make her hate me so she never touches me again._

It’s four months out when he starts gaining weight despite not eating anything. He looks shorter, nose bigger, hair more unkempt because that way no one will ever touch him. At physicals they remark that despite looking as if he’s gained weight, he hasn’t actually gained anything at all. He hates it when they take pictures for files because it means they can always see him- what if they think he’s desirable? What if they want to touch him-

_Don’t take pictures of me._

Alto Clef could look however he liked, and that was damn fine with him, like a coping strategy, a survival tactic. Nothing wrong with lying if it kept you alive. There is safety in knowing women look at him with disgust. There is safety in knowing that reality is always a little bent around him, giving him room to grow, to move, to breathe, to put some distance between Francis’s body and Alto’s surroundings. Hell, after a while, he didn’t look like Francis at all.

And that was damn fine with him, because he lived as Francis for 22 years and look where that had gotten him.

There are confused looks and more discomfort and after a while; he flaunts it.  _Hey, babe, wanna come back to my place tonight?_  She flicks him off.  _What about you? Would you have sex with me?_ She turns away.  _Damn bitch doesn’t know what she’s missing, huh? Huh? What about you? Would you touch me? I bet you would have touched Francis. He would have let you touch him, you know that? He might have even cried._

One man’s mutilation is another man’s survival strategy.

* * *

# 1:34 am in the dark feeling her

* * *

# 3

 

 

> 99% of Type Greens undergo the following sequence of psychological changes as their powers progress.
> 
> PHASE 1: Denial: The subject refuses to acknowledge their ability to warp reality. The Type Green will attempt to rationalize away their abilities by various means. In some cases, the Type Green will end here: their ability will be self-suppressed, and they will not proceed. However, most then proceed to:
> 
> PHASE 2: Experimentation: The subject acknowledges their abilities and begins to test the limits of their powers. In general, Type Greens tend to experiment in one of two patterns: slowly, methodically, and carefully, advancing a small amount at a time, or in a small number of sudden jumps. In any case, the subject will generally remain in this mode for some time, before proceeding to:
> 
> PHASE 3: Stability: The subject reaches the limit of their powers, and determines the boundaries of their abilities. The Type Green achieves control over their reality shifts, and can manipulate them as necessary. More importantly, they can choose not to utilize their abilities, if needed.
> 
> Phase 3 is usually characterized by attempts to live a "normal" life. The subject will continue in normal routines, and aside from necessary precautions to prevent losing control, will utilize their abilities only in private, and only in a manner that will not harm others. These Type Greens may be classified as Threat Level 1 (monitor, do not engage), but should be monitored closely, due to the risk of proceeding to Phase 4.
> 
> PHASE 4: The Child-God: Sadly, the majority of Type Greens will eventually progress to Phase 4. During this phase, the reality bender becomes obsessed with the power it possesses and will attempt to utilize it for personal gain at the cost of others. This phase is marked by reduced empathy for other humans, inability to accept personal faults, and increased megalomania.
> 
> Although warning signs are numerous, the key aspect of a Phase 4 is the use of their abilities to manipulate other humans. Teenage and young adult Type Greens will typically use their abilities for sexual purposes…
> 
> _-[PHYSICS Division Field Manual 13: Special Circumstances, Humanoid Thread Entities,](http://www.scp-wiki.net/goc-supplemental-humanoid-guide)_  Published 1984.

When they were teenagers she touched him.

They were laying in bed at his house and it was dark, and Lilly knew he wasn’t asleep because he was staring at the ceiling but she did it anyway and maybe pretended that he was asleep, and he owed it to her. He owed this to her, because it must  _suck_ , it must  _suck_  to always ask and have him always say no, to want him and to always get no as an answer. Sometimes you need to make compromises, he tells himself, in a relationship.  _Sometimes you need to let it happen for the other person’s sake._

So it was raining outside and she touched his chest. There was rain on the roof and rain on the windows and she touched his hips. There was rain on the street and clouds in the sky and she touched him right below the elastic band of his boxers, manicured nails and tips of fingers. The light post outside casts light through the rain and she touches the hair between his legs and his heart picks up speed and at the time he thought it was arousal but would learn later in his life that it was fear and would also learn that there is a fine,

Fine,

        line

              between the two,

And she goes down a little farther,

And he feels everything,

And she touches the soft skin of the space between _███_ _██████ _███__ _███_ _███_ _██████_ _██_ _███_ _█████_ ,

And his heart beats fast and his chest hurts,

And then she slides up two of her fingers and touches him and he lets her because he owes this to her,

Owes this to her,

Owes this to her,

_You need to be able to do some things for love._

Her fingers are _██_ _███_ _█████_ now and he thinks,  _be aroused_.  _Get turned on. You’re lucky to have her._ She curls up to him, blond hair and thin body and the rain outside, sleeping in her jeans, arching her body against strips of orange lamp light filtering through the blinds.

_You need to do something._

Her entire hand is _██████_ _██████_ _███_ _████_ now, almost _██_ _███_ _████_. He feels frozen. His heart pounds at her silhouette; for a moment she looks like a predator to him, like something skeletal and powerful, something with a mouth full of canine teeth, and just when she touches the head of his penis it comes rushing in so quickly that his ears ring and he grabs her arm a bit too harshly, too carelessly, too quickly.

“Francis.” Muses Lily. Looking back he sees this as their first encounter, the first time she enters what he would know in another life to be phase two; the phase of power, of control.

She’s a goddess, and that isn’t a good thing.

For a second, Francis thinks she’s about to throw him off for even daring to touch her. Her eyes are obscured in the light and ridges of her spine are poking out one by one, all the way down her back, just under her skin; she takes his other hand and presses it to her own hip, under her shirt, and he can feel the top of her panties numbly through the buzzing daze but it does not feel like he wants it to feel and he hates it, hates it, hates it—

“Francis.” She says when he struggles, trying to work his hand back from under hers against her side, and this time it’s a warning. Her other hand is still on his cock, frozen, and the whole world is intensified, too bright, saturated with hazy light of numb fear like pinworms under his skin, wriggling, jolting. Index finger over _████_ _██_ _████_ , other hand sliding his own right under the ridge of her panties and there’s a silhouette of horns like when they were children but it’s just the bare outline like a shadow against the back wall like a red outline from the orange window light that starts to flicker, his chest feels heavy and his soul feels compressed and the world feels stunned and all he thinks is how quickly this happened and how quickly they grew up recreating scenes from  _Poltergeist_  and changing the channels on the radio with their minds and bending pennies without touching them and you, you,  _you_  with your horns and hooves and  _you_  with your mouth filled up with teeth and  _you_  with your hunger stronger than his would ever be and that should have been the first indication, looking back, that Francis should have run from her, her with her angry silhouette with water drop shadows and her with her tongue that grew sharper and pierced ever so slightly deeper as they grew and her with her thousand eyes when he only had three and her with her hand around his cock that night with the rain but Francis was young and didn’t know better and Francis trusted her more than anyone and Francis might have even loved her in a strange fearful way because Francis didn’t run then and Francis never would.

He yanked her hand from his boxers. She does not talk to him for another week, but he feels her manicured nails and fingertips for a year afterward.

He sleeps with his legs crossed for longer.

 

 

> Time until Site-19 Disaster:
> 
> 12553 days

* * *

# 4

Abigail Higbee considered herself to be a witch, and her youth pastor couldn’t change that about her, not even when she painted red sigil patterns on her black nails and fought with her mother over the church visits. No one knew when she and her boyfriend Nick caught a black cat and killed it for a ritual. It was a sacrifice to satan, and supposed to bring them good luck— or so said the instructions copied down from what they read on Nick’s mom’s battered PC over dial-up internet. She wasn’t like other girls. More mature, she figured, wiser than her mother and more open-minded, too. She dressed all in black and pierced her ears and got grounded for a week after telling her mother to fuck off.

In 1988, Abigail Higbee entered 8th grade at Pier County Middle School. She was 13. She weighed approximately 135 pounds. 5 feet, 2 inches. Female. Blood type AB.

She had her first period that summer, and the nature goddess that lived in the woods of Pier County, Cornwall knew, and decided that 1988 was as best a year as any to bring about the cleansing of the world.  _Would you like to serve a higher god?_  She asked them, showing them [her hooves and horns in the woods around their home.](http://scpsandbox2.wikidot.com/clefbutwhoa)

In 1988, Abigail Higbee was fertile, and so was Francis Wojciechoski.

* * *

# 4 (again)

YOU AND YOUR FUCKING RITUALS!!!

ALL YOUR FUCKING RITUALS!!

YOUR DOOR-SLAMMING RITUAL AND YOUR HAIR BRUSHING RITUAL AND YOUR SHARP-TONGUE RITUAL AND YOUR WON’T SPEAK TO ME FOR REASONS YOUR WON’T TELL ME RITUAL AND YOUR POKING HOLES IN ME RITUAL AND YOUR TELLING ME HOW HORRIBLE I AM RITUAL AND YOUR IGNORING RITUAL AND YOUR LYING RITUAL AND YOUR TELLING ME WHAT TO DO RITUAL AND YOUR DISDAIN RITUAL AND YOUR HATING RITUAL AND YOUR I LOVE EVERYONE BUT YOU AND YOU ARE MY LEAST FAVORITE RITUAL AND YOUR TOUCHING ME UNDER MY PANTS RITUAL AND YOUR THREATENING RITUAL AND YOUR CALLING ME NAMES RITUAL BUT OUT OF ALL THE RITUALS YOU MADE ME PERFORM I THINK IT WAS THE LAST RITUAL THAT KILLED ME BECAUSE I WAS YOUR LEAST FAVORITE FOLLOWER, YOUR MOST DISDAINFUL SERVANT, THE ONE YOU MADE REPENT, BUT IT NEVER MATTERED BECAUSE ONCE YOU DID THE LAST RITUAL YOU DIDNT NEED ME ANYWAYS AND NONE OF IT HURT YOU AT ALL.

FUCK YOU.

 

* * *

# 5

 

 

> 22\. All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses. If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country, or in France; he would give you a reason; and this reason would be some other fact; as a letter received from him, or the knowledge of his former resolutions and promises. A man finding a watch or any other machine in a desert island, would conclude that there had once been men in that island. All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. And here it is constantly supposed that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious. The hearing of an articulate voice and rational discourse in the dark assures us of the presence of some person: Why? because these are the effects of the human make and fabric, and closely connected with it. If we anatomize all the other reasonings of this nature, we shall find that they are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that this relation is either near or remote, direct or collateral. Heat and light are collateral effects of fire, and the one effect may justly be inferred from the other.
> 
> Therefore, one can argue that the men containing [Abigail Higbee](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-231) had no reason to check for the validity of her pregnancy in the ritual. Was she not grouped with the other six virgins of the ritual, who initiated violent XK-class scenarios upon the birth of their children? Did they not accept that they had no room to spare, that surely the birth of this bride, the seventh bride, would cause an irreversible end? They saw the others, and they saw her— a sheep in a pack of wolves. They had no reason to doubt, and the stakes for potentially doubting were far too high. If we were to doubt every Keter class entity that came under the Foundation's control, would we not loose everything? What is one mistake in the safety of billions? This is cause and effect. The poor fucks were simply trusting logic without a second doubt.
> 
> -David Hume,  _An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_ , Section IV,  _Skeptical Doubts Concerning The Operations Of The Understanding_ , Passage 22

* * *

 

 

# regarding anchors, or how she lived, or whatever you want it to mean

 

 

> ETHICS COMITTEE REVIEW OF DR. _███ _█__  “SCANTRON” VANG
> 
>  
> 
> DIRECTOR AMALI WISTUBA (ETHICS COMITTEE LEVEL 5): INTERVIEWER
> 
> _████_  “SCANTRON” VANG: DEFENDANT
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: Please disclose to the comittee the rituals involved with the creation of the core [of a Scantron Reality Buoy]
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: To what extent?
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: The people you are addressing right now have some of the highest clearance levels possible in our line of work. Disclose as much as you can regarding the core.
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: The core is- well, I mean, to understand what the core is, you have to understand that when type greens die, certain processes happen that we don’t fully understand, and one of those processes is the congealing of substances in- it’s hard to explain, mostly because we don’t really know- I mean- we’ve been working on this for years, the ritual has been around for centuries, we still don’t know how it works or why. A lot of the research on Hume theory in recent years has been driven through trying to understand how reality anchors work, but how we understand it right now is that type greens have specific regions of hume fluctuations in their brains on a physical level, and that’s what we detect when we confirm an individual is a type green through a Kant counter examination. When these individuals die, the power regions condense into material substances, and when we see ‘eyes’ and ‘third eyes’ mentioned in literature, we’re seeing vague understandings and descriptions of not only the ability to detect hume fluctuations on a level above our own, but also evidence of what we’re seeing physically in the brains of type greens. More powerful type greens will have more power regions, and that sort of thing, and how it affects things when they’re alive is again, something we’re pretty unsure of, but the physical aspect of what happens to the hume fields they’re emitting in life becomes far more apparent in death.
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: So you’re saying that type greens manifest their remaining power when they die in the form of physical objects that exist inside the brain.
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: Well, ‘physical objects’ is a little more vauge then they actually are. Usually they’re round, sometimes as big as a grain of sand, rarely exceeding the size of a marble. But they continue to exude hume energy at a base level for a couple months in their natural state until they fully degrade.
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: Which allows for...the effects of the reality anchors.
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: The core- I mean- yeah, the base of the actual thing is- you know, when they die-
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: You remove them.
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: From the corpses, yeah.
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: Is that all you remove from the corpses?
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: No, the- the ritual, uh, you know. We’re not sure how it works. The actual thing was derived from an old manuscript, but there are ways to prolong the degration of the eyes, and that treatment is given to them before putting them in the anchor, and it helps us control and use them in that context.
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: And your lab uses this ritual on the eyes collected from these individuals to build the core of these devices.
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: That’s correct.
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: Describe the ritual.
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: It’s...it’s not really necassary-
> 
> WISTUBA: I can assure you that it’s nothing we aren’t prepared to hear, after reviewing the material myself.
> 
>  
> 
> VANG: I wasn’t implying that you-
> 
>  
> 
> WISTUBA: Please describe the ritual, _████_.

 

* * *

# quite the role model you make 

 

 

>  
> 
> Day 76  
> 
> Time 13:00
> 
> Temperature: -40 degrees C
> 
>  

Alto does not turn on his flashlight until he is sure whatever was chasing him is gone. He waits exactly 30 minutes according to his watch (never trust your own sense of time unless you have to), counting from the moment he clumsily threw his body into the charred husk of the south-facing heavy equipment garage. It’s empty, of course, and he counts the occupants and their cowardly snowmobiles missing and dead after last night’s storm.

 

Clef does not, either, put much thought to what was chasing him. Many modern task forces may feel otherwise about this, and he knows that they’re probably scientifically and technically correct, all things considered, with their specialized armor and radar helmets and god knows what else packed onto well-trained bodies and carefully monitored hearts and minds.

 

All of them pussies, he thought. Real men run from their problems, because in type green targets it won’t matter in a few minutes anyway. Alto had heard the distant screech and hobbled the fuck out of there as fast as his piece of shit legs would take him, not really knowing for sure if it had seen him or not- probably not, if it was far away- but he had seen it run past about 30 seconds after he’d taken cover. A 6 foot blob of incorporeal mist.

 

Clef exhaled. A lot of the thoughts he’d been having lately involved the word _fuck_ . It had a sort of poetic response to it that he hadn’t noticed before, the sharp, heartfelt sincerity of misery and comical misfortune. _F U C K_ that shit. Fuck it. Fuck it hard in the ass. Fuck.

 

The longest Clef had previously been on a hunt for a type green: Montana, summer of 1987, three weeks in the back of a white van with three other guys and that 84-year-old bitch Joanne driving. It had turned out that they had spent those three weeks in the hume influence field itself, and had just been driving the same 10 mile stretch of desert the entire time. When they stopped and walked straight out in week 2, it was the same 5 mile stretch in a horizontal direction, then the 5 mile stretch on the other side, then the road again. A 10 mile in diameter circle. They almost died from exposure before they found that piece of shit five miles underground.

 

He missed the heat.

 

Alto fumbled vaguely with the flashlight, fingers numb but not quite frostbitten enough yet for it to be a major concern. He never thought he would miss the god damn heat.

 

The first thing he does when the beam comes on is check the garage, and he immediately knows from his place squeezed near the entrance that shit went down there. The back bomb door was blown in, but boarded up. Snowmobiles missing, and now that he can see he can confirm that yes, _all_ the snowmobiles are missing. All 45 of them that should be there are gone, which either means 45 panicked people or one very determined person.

 

Either way, they’re probably dead, and chances are whatever fucked them over is gone by now.

 

When he moves the beam to the outside- the side facing the space siberian tree line- he stops, and turns it off, and sits very quietly. He holds his breath, because if there is no other proof in this world that karma exists and comes back to bite someone in the ass when they’re old and have a fucky right leg and can’t do shit about it, he’s just witnessed it. Not proof he was going to die, mind you, but complete, definitive proof that some Bixby shit came straight from hell to fuck him over and he’s been being watched for days, months, years, decades.

 

When Alto Clef calmly decides that he’s ready to face the concequences of his actions, he smiles broadly and switches the light back on towards the treeline.

 

Nailed to every individual tree is a dead carabou.

 

Now, Clef has seen shit before. He’s seen things trick him and trick other people. He saw a kid eat her parents once, another kid drown themselves in the bathtub. He’s seen kids turn the dirt red and blood blue, seen them fumble with little big powers that just don’t end up being able to best a gun. They cry and scream and throw temper tantrums, and even the adults do, because they’re little brat shit creatures that think they control the world just because they’re a god, and the truth is that damn near no god really is a god in the conventional sense. No god is all-powerful or all-encompassing. Sometimes, though, you can get really damn close.

 

On _every tree_ is a dead caribou.

 

They’re pinned with iron railroad spikes, but not uniform. Some are mauled worse than others, some are bottom up, some are stomach out. Some are in the branches, some are on the ground, nailed on trunks. Every tree as far as his little light can see. And when the fake sun rises suddenly into a green sky and casts long shadows on dead trees with their needles shed, bare bones of dead things, dead dead dead, he can see them all under the illumination that they’ve sent to make him see. Back to back to back, all the way to the horizon. There are not enough damn carabou in the whole north to be nailed to each and every tree, but he can see them, now, because the snow has also stopped and the wind has stopped and the world has come to a stop so he can gaze on this alter. The mountains go up into the green sky and he can see, even there, even at the edge of his vision, flecks of red meat and blood on dead trunks of trees. All the world is the north, and all the world is the carabou on railroad spikes.

 

They are not dead.

 

He realizes this- they are not dead, but in unbelievable pain. The one closest to him with glazed eyes and heaving flank flails its front legs so they fall against air and blood dribbles onto the ground, and suddenly the fake world fills with sounds of animal screams and thrashing, thuds of great bodies hitting the snow-covered ground. They scream and scream and scream and throw their horns into the oaks and bleed and thrash until they tear through their flesh vessels and fall, chaotically, unbelievably, unimaginably. Clef does not look away because he simply drinks it in in all its lovecraftian immensity, basking in the deep green light of a far false sun until he feels the hume level drop dramatically enough to erase the floor beneth him and the reindeer and the sky, the trees, the screaming of dying animals.

 

It drops so dramatically, in fact, that he feels his thoughts in front of him, and then some- it keeps dropping. It drops until he can only see with the pathetic touch think of his third eye, and he exhales and slows his heart rate and allows the resulting vaccum to hurdle his third self out of his vessle at a high enough rate that he braces for impact.

 

Alto solidifies the reality around his third form. He isn’t strong enough to stop this and has never been, will never be, but he can ride it so long as he keeps his psychic concentration. He brings his astrial body into a dense ball and solidifies his immediate reality field again, careful not to loose track of his vessel. The vaccum is white, lukewarm. If he was a fool, he’d return to his body and take advantage of the environment to play god.

 

But Clef is no fool.

 

Even though he prepares for it, the hume waves crashing back into the vacuum around him startles him, like jumping into a pool of freezing water. The ground under him returns and his third form slams back into his vessel with a force that throws the wind from him, and he gasps sharply for breath in the brief moment the hume level is normal, then feels his stomach sink when he realizes that he was returned to it because the level is rising. This time, he is not knocked from his body, but chooses to leave it, again condensing his third form into a tight ball that bobs and rolls just beneath the rising waves. Clef fears, for a moment, that he’ll reach the top and drown, but there is no top- the world is increasing in pressure, not volume. His vessel is lying prone on the garage floor. His consciousness screams for movement as the third plane becomes thicker, heavier, solid like cement and mud. His teeth are bleeding badly in his vessel and he feels it and tries to move back, only to feel his form slowed by the heaving reality, the pressing inwards; he is shrinking, being pushed from all sides, condensed into a smaller and smaller space until his entire consciousness is the size of the top of a thumbtack in a way he never knew was possible and this is when Alto Clef thinks _sweet god, I’m going to die. I’m going to die._ And then the hume level is yanked out violently and this time Clef careens onto the ground and through the ground and into the dirt, which disappears into the white vacuum, and he’s in the air for a moment with the last of the hume level supporting him and that disappears, too, and he starts falling, falling, and falls directly into the again thickening swamp of hume waves as the density soars back upwards--

 

_I’m going to die._

* * *

# 11:59 pm

 

 Kid,

Everything you are is a delicate dance between what you love and what you fear.

 

Shit’s just called being human.

 

* * *

# (what you are and all you are)

Alto Clef never had a will, not because he assumed a feeling of arrogance over death but because he knew what they were going to do to him. How he felt about this was irrelevant because of its comminality; he, himself, had done it to others, had came to the conclusion long ago about the reality of mutilation and exploitation. Many people would want his body when he died. Hopefully, he thought, it would just be a matter of which person.

So when the Foundation response teams dug his frozen body out of the snow, they took him to a small facility on the outskirts of Paris. Dr.Scantron started with a lateral incision, just above the forehead, and he and his assistants would spend the next 45 minutes carefully pushing aside brain matter and muscle. More powerful reality benders could have up to 30 third eyes.

Alto only ever had one, and they found it about 30 minutes in, buried deep in the back of his head around the stem; a smooth, round, green object about the size of a marble. Once they had cut it free of the surrounding cells, they plucked it out with tweezers and unceremoniously dropped it into a 50mL graduated cylinder. It hit the glass with a soft  _tink_ , and rolled to a stop at the bottom, shimmering slightly in the florecent lights. Inpenitrable, but it would run out of steam in a few decades without a host; what happened to it then depended on the agent.

Then, they would open his mouth. They would remove his teeth, all of them, and they came out fairly easily; decades of chain smoking would do that to you. They would cut off his fingers and strip them of the flesh. They would cut out his lower lumbar, and pull free the spinal cord. And when they were done, they would grind it all up (except for the eye, of course, which would remain gleaming throughout the process) and throw everything into a steel pot with rosemary from the local grocery store.

And they would burn it in the laboratory oven.

Where they put the rest of his body doesn't matter, although some may find some solace in hearing that he would be properly buried and marked with only his initials in a graveyard nearby; no, the contents of the pot would be carfully scooped into a small metal tube, and embedded into the center of a metal sphere about the size of a tennis ball. This reality anchor would be only powerful enough to protect a single agent, which was something that Alto himself would ponder at night when his eye still resided in his head and he could flip the TV channels with his mind. Who would he go to? Would he even be powerful enough to be made into one at all? He barely made the lowest qualifications, but would he rather his remains be used for something useful, something other than sliding a coin across the table in private or sensing the presence of others? Was there even anything left of his power at all? What if  **She**  took it like  **She**  took everything else?

But the anchor- a model 6z (the smallest), serial number 4552035 (the lowest value)- would go to an agent residing with her wife, for the time being, at Site 17 in Poland. It would come to her in a metal box along with a new handgun and a plastic ID with a new clearance level on it. She would carry it with her everywhere, as was the point of it, and Andrea Adams would admit to her daughters several years in the future that it was, indeed, the most haunted item they owned. The dog avoided it; the cat would hiss at it. Her wife would insist that it "could watch them having sex", and would ask her, "Can't you just take that dingy thing out the garage for a tonight?", to which she would grudgingly accept, moving it from her nightstand to the workbench outside. It would save her many times in various ways. Would save her children, although it never took well to them- her daughters would be filled with an overwhelming sense of dread while holding it, and left it alone in their mother's work bag for the most part. The little blue LED light embedded in the side to show it's active state would glow softly while she slept. It would get dented, and it didn't fit well into her pocket, but would fit okay into a purse. The paint would rub off a bit. It would accompany her on a rediculous number of missions throughout her career, and would get lost more times than she could count, wether it would be black market dealers who knew what it was, or her leaving her bag on a train, or rolling out in a firefight. It would come back one way or another. Would show up in an unmarked box on her front step. Would be in the passengers' seat of her car. Would be back on her nightstand in the morning, right next to her handgun, right where it belonged. Maybe it felt like it owed her a debt. Maybe it was just trying to be annoying. Maybe it just was what it was, which was very clearly abnormal, even for an anomalous item. She never would get around to reporting it. Little did she know it would be the best wedding gift they had received.

When it would die out one night about thirty years later, she would wake up suddenly feeling as if she had lost an old friend.

 

 

 

> when i am dead, take the eyes from my head. take the teeth from my jaws. the bones of my fingers. the sinew of my spine. burn me in rosemary; carry me with you.
> 
> i will stay.
> 
> \- A prayer from an older time.

* * *

 

 

# 6

When the seven brides were conceived for the red king in the winter of 1989 in Cornwall, england, the ritual was completed in an abandoned barn on the property of the sect vice leader, a teenaged boy named Nick. They killed the six cats and twelve goats. The runes were carved. The virgins were summoned from where they were hidden and nailed to seven posts and Will raped each of them, one at a time. They chanted and hummed. When he reached the seventh mother- a devout named Abigail, who was Nick’s 16 year old lover and partner- they kissed, and he began, and it was not rape for her. They knew it would not be. No smart servant puts all his eggs in one basket, and Abigail had dreamed of serving her god in this manner.

She was not the seventh virgin, and she would not birth the seventh bride.

There was no ritual for Francis, who on the night of the winter ritual in Cornwall drank wine with his childhood friend, Lilly, on a nearby shore. He did not notice it when she put something in his drink because he never in a million years would have thought she would do anything but protect him. She led him to the rocky shore and he noted how the drink was affecting him and the thought you need to get out of here crossed his mind, and he stayed. And Lilly forced him to the ground and smashed his head onto a rock and he struggled and it only took ten minutes, her hair, her breath, the smell of the lake, the pain in his head, his groin, his lower stomach, Lilly please, Lilly, stop.

There was no chanting for Francis’ ritual. There were no thumping tribal drums. No animals were slaughtered. There were no runes. No one heard him cry and he needed no ropes to hold him down. His panic was palpable, his body frozen. She did not say his name even though he begged hers. When she put him inside her he turned his head to the side and watched the soft waves lap a cold shore and said Lilly, Lilly, please, and she heard him and did not stop, and he was angry and tried to push her away and she did not stop, and he had bruises on his arms, bleeding from his head, groggy and afraid the sect leader for the local red god chapter- intent on bringing about a better world- did not kiss him because she never loved him, and this would be the first and the last time Francis would ever have sex and she did not stop until he came inside her and that would be the moment that would cause him so much pain over the next 20 years, asking himself in dark nights in empty beds Did I want it if I came? If I was erect, does it mean it was what I wanted? Why did she fuck me? What did I do? Am I overreacting? This is seduction, I was seduced, some things just can’t happen to men.

She would leave him there on the shore. He could not rise to meet her, and would not say a word when she pulled off him and dressed to leave, or for many hours after she left. He crawled from the rising tide and tried to dress- fingers numb, body heavy. Confused, what did you take from me, Lilly? What did you do to me? His vision is blurred and his head is aching. He vomits until there is nothing left in his stomach and tries to get up again and stumbles. The ritual took only ten minutes for Francis; he will forever contemplate how something that took ten minutes to happen could have possibly done so much to him, how it could have possibly taken so much from him, how swift and silent and brutal it had been, no words exchanged, no explaining what she was doing in some antagonistic monologue, no dramatic turn.

She had raped him on the cold shore and left him there. Rape is such an extreme word. She had seduced him on the cold shore. Tricked him. He should have known better; isn’t it up to an agent to know better? Wasn’t it his fault when he had a thousand opportunities to flee and a thousand opportunities to throw her off, if you had only done this, Francis, it wouldn’t have happened? One thousand red flags shrugged off in cheap wine and laughter, the few hours before, when she poured his third or fourth drink for him and he was tipsy, and he saw her put something in it and drank it anyway, left his gun in the car, knife on her table, all the little things and chances he had to stop it and he didn’t, so didn’t he want it if he knew where it was going? If he saw her put something in his drink and the thought of leaving, his regular gut feeling of something is wrong here dampered in alcohol but he felt it, some wisp of anxiety as she led him down the beach, if you knew why didn’t you leave, why did you let her do it to you?

He felt small in the early morning on the cold dark beach. He didn’t know what he wanted. He was confused, and half dressed, and sick, body throbbing. And when he woke up in his sleeping bag in the back of the GOC mission van, groggy from a hangover and some unknown drug with bandages covering a thousand cuts and bruises and a single bad gash on the back of his head, his teammates gave him water and clapped him on the back and congratulated him for finally getting some, asked if she was hot, how big her boobs were, if she screamed when she came, joking any sex worth having ends with a concussion and he made up some shit about how hot she was and how they went three times and just passed out after and thats why they found him laying on the beach half dressed and they left cornwall that morning and Agent Ukelele slept, oh god, just passed out, lulled by the lurching and bouncing of the car and the bickering of his teammates, dreaming about it, turning it over in his mind, feeling where she touched him, where she left bruises, the aches in his muscles from where he tried to push her off, like she had taken every ounce of strength from him in the ten minutes she made him the seventh virgin.

He would wake up and they were still driving and he could feel the pain in his lower abdomen. Between his legs. His ass. His thighs. He felt sick. He wondered if what he thought happened really happened, but he hurt like it did. He wondered if she felt this way, and doubted it. He wondered why she did it. He wondered why she didn’t stop. He wondered when they stopped at a gas station and he staggered into the bathroom to take a piss and was alone and went into a stall and slid down his pants and underwear and looked at his lower stomach and testicles, these deep fucking bruises, wondered if they had been there when they found him, wondered how they got there and what else she did to him that he might have blocked out in those ten minutes of fucking nightmare insanity that he kept wondering about. He wondered this when they moved the van onto a ferry to cross the london channel into France and wondered this when the drugs had left his system and he was well enough to fight again and wondered long enough to be angry and wondered long enough to kill her and to see his child in some kind of rage state, some kind of awful sort of disconnect brewing in his soul.

Francis would remember shooting Lilly once. What Francis actually did was shoot her, and then shoot her, and then shoot her, and then shoot her, and then shoot her, and then shoot her, and then pull the trigger again but be out of bullets, and then roll her dead body over and just throttle her with a blank expression on his face until he calmed himself and stopped punching a dead body and for a long time his daughter would think about that scene and wonder why were you do violent and not know the answer until it was shown to her (although that would be a story for another time). Francis would remember crawling over with blood dripping from his right knee and picking up his 5 year old daughter and taking her to a nunnery, but what Francis actually did was stand up- adrenaline rushing through his body, shattered knee snapping- and look over at his daughter. He would limp over and pick her up, and she would cry. He would be holding her too tightly and would wonder if he could hold her tighter. He wanted to cause her pain, thinking you did this, you did this, and would instead stumble out of the woods in a sort of drunken haze in the rain with the blood from his rapist running down his limbs from where it soaked his clothes, holding his daughter in hand. They would go to the nunnery, but first he would scrawl some barely-legible message on a scrap of paper because he wanted to hurt this child, wanted to hurt her like her mother hurt him, wanted to kill her, and he remembered thinking to himself I’m not a good father.

And he knocked on the nunnery door and limped off with her standing there. She would wonder why he killed her mother in this way. She would wonder if he was a violent man. She would sit through bible studies where the nuns would show fires and burning demons and the silhouettes of the tortured, and she would tell Sister Darline one day that she saw her father kill her mother, and would ask, Sister, will my father go to hell? And she would say Yes.  _He will. God will punish him for what he’s done_. And she would ask,  _What if my father is a good man after all?_  And Sister Darline would say If he has killed another, he has sinned irreparably against God. And she will ask,  _Will God forgive him?_  And Sister Darline would say,  _Only if he repents._

On New Years’ Eve, 2017- three hours before the largest breach in Foundation history- the seventh bride lay kneeled at her bedside in prayer, and she asked,  _God? Are you there?_

And this time, a God answered her.

* * *

 

 

> TO WHICHEVER OVERSEER HAS THE TERRIBLE MISFORTUNE OF HAVING TO STEP OVER MY FATASS FROZEN DEAD BODY WITH THEIR GUCCI BOOTS WHEN THEY VISIT THE WRECKAGE OF THIS STALIN ERA DEATH PIT IN SPRING AFTER THIS HELLFUCK OF A SHITSHOW IS OVER:
> 
> God  _damn_ , I hope Benjamin Kondraki is sober enough to kill my daughter.
> 
> Wish you were here,
> 
> Clef

 

* * *

A letter to you, as you know yourself, a being that is able to walk away:

 

In this profession you walk the thin ice.

 

No matter what happens, you have to keep walking. You look straight on ahead and you keep walking. Sometimes, the ice gets thinner, and the going gets harder; there are nights and days and blizzards and ice never ends, but you gotta keep walking. Straight on into that vast fucking blue.

 

So one day the sun is high in the sky, and your shadow comes walking.

 

“Hey,” He says, “Did you know the Montauk girl died?” and you say “Really, you don’t say.” Because you’re walking the thin ice straight ahead. Your shadow keeps on walking next to you and to keep the conversation going you say “Tell me more about that thing with the Montauk girl.” And your shadow whistles in that cold bleak desert on the thin ice and says “Well, couldn’t you believe it, April 2014, the birthing came and nothing could stop it. The baby came dead and nothing happened, and the girl died right after.” And you nod and keep walking the thin ice. Your shadow is a raptor that feeds on your being but you let it, because it goes to far lands for you and controls your long-dead body. So you laugh and say “Well, at least we didn’t have the wrong girl.” And your shadow says “Oh, we did, we had the wrong girl, and you wouldn’t you believe you would have done the same damn thing. We found all seven of the mothers that were to birth the brides lined up in that barn in cornwall and we took the seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, all lined up, all the raped ones. The ritual was adorned with red and was holy, holy, holy to the god in the highest of heaven in the deepest of sand. The hate in their bodies made the hate in their wombs, and we took no chances with the seventh one, because when one, two, three, four, five, six, all lined up, all the real ones, all of them the same reaction you know you would think wouldn’t you that the seventh would be real, too, but the seventh wanted it. Because you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and the seventh is meant to last past birth; the seventh was always made to survive. So the seventh one was yours, Francis, wouldn’t you believe you were the seventh virgin and lilly was the seventh mother and your daughter is the seventh bride and she’s sitting in her cell at 17 right now looking out can’t you believe it Francis what _have_ we gotten ourselves into, that we had the wrong girl?” And you laugh and you walk the thin ice.

 

 _But wait!_ You cry, and indeed your involvement in this story makes you doubt your favorability of it at all but you allow it for now because you aren’t quite sure what’s happening and are perhaps shaken, thinking _this is terrible! How could this happen!_ And let me tell you something:

 

We are walking the thin ice.

 

When something terrible happens, and god, we know it does, because we make mistakes every day- we walk the thin ice. _This is stupid,_ you say, and it is, but it’s how we survive. The ice gets thinner and the days get longer and the shifts blur together and there is chamber after chamber after chamber ahead of you, hundreds and then thousands, and you walk the thin ice. It is in our profession to take the pen and wield it and with a few quick keystrokes say _this man will never see light again,_ and it is possible that this is far too harsh for the man and we have misjudged our scientific inquiries, because we make mistakes. It is easy, in our profession, to decide offhandedly that something is impossible, or unrealistic, and write it off as something that will never happen, and then be unprepared when it does, because we make mistakes. It is easy, in our profession, to say that we do all things perfectly; that we walk the thin ice and never fall through. But we do, because we make mistakes.

 

It’s called being human.

 

We’re human, and we’re walking the thin ice. We take it day by day and we’re being human. We’re doing our best to save the world and sometimes, we take things too damn far, but we do it because we’re being human. Look at us! You and I! We’re walking the thin ice, right across the lake from the shore. _Will the ice ever end?_ You ask, and the answer is no. _Will we find the answers we need?_ You ask, and the answer is no. We’re being human, and we’re walking the thin ice, and the Montauk girl was the wrong girl all along and we just have to keep walking the thin ice right into the horizon.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Yours,

  
  
  
  
  


Francis

 

* * *

 

 

 

> # Associated Art 
> 
> Made to be scattered into the piece. This was not accomplished fully. 
> 
>   
>    
>    
>    
>    
> 


	3. The Deep Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wrote two tales for Gears; the first started off this entire series, and I abandoned it when I started writing "Major Tom". The second one was veerrrry rough. I'm including it here, but the older one is more complete overall, although this one was going to be the one I would have published.

Site 19 lies on the northernmost land of the Lyakhovsky islands of Siberia. The site is ten miles in diameter, but the territory under Foundation control is thirty miles in diameter and includes the entire island on which it stands, which lays to the west of Stolbovy Island and is often brushed over by those travelling farther north to Kotelny and the Anzhu Islands in the Arctic Ocean. The region is of little use commercially. The nearest major port is Tiksi, on the northernmost mainland, with a population of just over 5,000; it is 400-odd Kilometers away, travelling Southwest from the site over the unforgiving Laptev Sea. The best way to arrive and leave is by plane, and many do-- the site is split into summer and winter seasons, and fluctuates between a population of 3,000 (in the summer months from April to September) and a population of 1,400 (in the winter from October to March)-- and indeed, this means that the majority of the site staff is seasonal. Blizzards are frequent; the Laptev Sea and its islands are home to some of the most severe storms of the Arctic Ocean. In 11 months out of the year, the temperature does not rise above freezing.  There are no trees. The caribou often cross the frozen sea to graze, pushing apart snow with antlers to eat the sparse undergrowth underneath. In the summer season, the sun does not set. In the winter season, the sun does not rise.

Gears could not imagine living anywhere else.

Given, of course, that he had lived there for the past 35 years, this wasn’t too much of a feat by any stretch of imagination; Charlie had been researching at Site 19 for so long that it was second nature. He was a cold man, but that didn’t matter, because he had a job to do; was a harsh man, but that didn’t matter, either, because all the paperwork was done on time and was entered in inpeccibly. He was not a kind man- had a reputation for running the tightest ship out of all the research Sites on this side of London. He was not a brave man, either- but we’ll address this later. 

 

But god damn if he wasn’t good. 

 

Why he was assigned an assistant in the January of 2014 he would never know. There was a moment when he felt offended, almost, as if central command was telling him that his job was being done haphazardly, or that he wasn’t good enough. In all truth, it was Jack Bright glancing at the age listed on his medical file that prompted his assignment with Julian Iceberg. A small mercy- that was all it was.  _ 63 years old,  _ which was around the same age of Jack himself, although Jack didn’t suffer from the inevitable tolls the job took over time, the ones that Charlie was showing, the rapidly beating heart, the cold sweats in the night of accumulated trauma, the trembling hands on mechanical parts and tight pain of anxious muscles in his lower lumbar. Stress killed. Stress killed easily in their profession, and Charles worked long nights often alone, talked little, carried a heavy workload. 

 

It was a small mercy, taken with the swipe of a pen and the strike of a stamp proclaiming APPROVED. That’s all it ever was. 

 

So Charles Gears looked wearily over the young man standing in front of his desk in the October of 2014 and inwardly recoiled at the idea of having to share his space with someone else. Jack had put substancial thought into this match, aware of Charlie’s usual resistance to change, and indeed Julian fit the bill; independant, intellegent, hardworking. Persistant. Antisocial. Ready to fall into work and not surface for days, and most incredible of all: able to call medical if Charlie was to collapse or break. It was a good sentiment. 

 

He did not appreciate it. 

 

But Charlie  _ despised  _ change. 

  
  
  
  
  


 

* * *

**Input:** Subject D-187, male Caucasian, 28 years old, 63kg, 173cm tall. (setting: Very Fine)

 

How does one choose a sacrificial lamb? 

 

_ He was 63kg. 28 years old. Male.  _

 

The god in the chamber did not care what lamb was brought to him, shuffling, ignorant, hungry, impure. The python does not care what mouse is brought to it’s nest for feed, and the bear trap does not care if it catches a bear or a deer. This one’s name was Jay, a mechanic from Moscow. Went to church every sunday; roman catholic. Lived an honest life. Had three tattoos. Killed his wife. 

 

_ Did it matter who he was?  _

 

Did it matter what his name was in the winter of 1984 did it matter? Did it matter? Did it matter at all to the snake or the bear trap or the god or to you. 

 

You were standing there in your lab coat and your closed-toed lab shoes in the early morning with your clipboard in one arm and your head shaved. 

 

_ Did it matter who he was?  _

_ How did you choose the sacrificial lamb?  _

 

You chose him because he was the first, yes, the first, his last name started with C and all the As and Bs were taken so your team chose him. Luck of the draw, you saw him first in the herd and picked him out of convienience, out of his averageness, his uncontaminated body and mind. Elimination of variables and saftey hazards, Jay stood there in the 914 chamber and the door slid open and in stepped Jay. 

 

It takes a minute before the team is ready, so there’s a moment between Jay stepping in the chamber and your starting the experiment itself where he just stands there, in the best’s mouth, standing before god in his orange jumpsuit. 

 

_ What did you say to him as he stood before god?  _

 

You spoke into the recording device.  _ What did you say to him as he stood before god, before a hungry thing?  _

 

“This is Doctor Gears, experiment leader. Subject is D-187, male, Caucasian, 28 years old, 63 kilograms, 173 centimeters. Setting will be placed on Very Fine.” 

 

_ What did you say to him as the hungry snake breathed down his neck?  _

 

“Begin.” 

 

_ Who closed the door who closed the door did you do it did you do it? Was it you? Did you- you didn’t- you wouldn’t have- who closed the door on that man-- _

 

The door closed. 

* * *

“Didn’t you just wash your hands?” 

Charlie wants to squeeze his eyes shut at that sentence. The red haired man enters the bathroom they share, bare feet on tile. He cannot form words, like the singular sentence remarked by his partner shook everything from him, like the fact that it was noticeable made it real and not just scalding hot water on his already bleeding hands. He does not answer at first. He is swallowing shame. 

“Charlie.” 

* * *

The second the red haired man’s hands touch his wrists on either side, arms wrapping around his shoulders and chest pressed on his back, Charlie chokes on something deep and thick in his throat. 

“I thought you were asleep.” He stammers.

“No, you were waiting for me to fall asleep so you could wash your hands again.” The red haired man turns off the water. The words hurt like they hit a place he did not know existed, and Charlie does not respond. There are a thousand tiny fissures covering his hands. The skin feels too small and hurts to move. Tiny rivulets of blood well around two of his knuckles as the water no longer washes them away. His hands are red, his wrists are red, his blood is red, and the red haired man holds him tightly as he cries. 

_ I wish I could stop for you.  _

 

From mottled trachea and shredded neck it lifts its head from the bottom of the holding cell and said-

 

_ -Feed me seymour, feed me now!  _ Cries the television in the deep dark in the days before the world collapsed in on itself, an image of a cartoonish plant puppet bouncing around on the screen. It’s cold in there at 3am, it’s burns under his skin. Down the corridor from the breakroom, a florecent bulb flickers- 

 

-Down its spine. Gears can see clockwork push and pull under its skin, and standing there, watching it writhe in the test chamber, it can see the bruses forming into welts forming into cysts, bursting and ripping, tearing, fresh teeth on metal flooring-

 

- _ If I can talk, and I can move, who’s to say I can’t do anything I want? _ Says the TV in the level 4 breakroom in the morning he comes back from the test covered in blood and puss, shaken, for the first time, to his core, the very center of his being-

 

-it’s like the entire mound of flesh is about to lyse and burst, grinding and bleeding onto the floor. It writhes and runs its teeth up and down the plastic shielding on the side of the tank and makes noise, moaning, screaming, dragging its body on metal that stutters and pulls on the concrete. In the early morning they undo the six locks on the empty lab they left it in, that  _ thing,  _ in a holding cell so deep into the permafrost that no one but them could find it, and they stand back from the chamber and hose it down from a distance. Blood rinses with water and drains out of the tank down the lab drain a foot away- 

 

- _ Feed me.  _ Says the VCR running  _ little shop of horrors  _ in the early morning when he comes into the level 4 dormitory that morning watching blood run with water down the shower drain,  _ get a hold of yourself-  _

  
-When did you start throwing up? That week? The next time you saw it? The time you walked in with the research team to the lab in the deep dark to find that it had molted completely, a human skin shed on the floor? When did you start throwing up whenever you saw the deep dark, whenever you were told to go  _ down there-  _

 

* * *

Why are you so scared?

 

_ Because he fucked me he fucked me and i liked it when he fucked me and called me beautiful and told he loved me i liked it i liked it i liked it  _

 

If you liked it, then why did you need to confess?

 

_ Because it was bad it was bad it was bad bad bad i needed to tell my father i needed to tell him i cant lie to him i cant lie i cant lie i needed to CONFESS i needed to CONFESS i needed to CONFESS _

 

If you liked it, then why did you stop? 

 

_ It was BAD it was BAD thats not ALLOWED it could ruin EVERYTHING it only takes ONE MISTAKE FOR IT ALL TO FALL APART i cant RISK IT i cant RISK EVERYTHING FOR THAT _

 

Nothing bad will happen to you if you’re gay in the Foundation. 

 

_ I’M NOT GAY IM NOT GAY ITS NOT TRUE IM NOT IM NOT _

 

Nothing bad will happen to you. That’s in the past. 

 

_ WHY WOULD I RISK EVERYTHING FOR THAT JUST IN CASE ITS NOT TRUE WHY WOULD I TAKE THAT CHANCE IF I COULD LOOSE EVERYTHING IT’S JUST NOT WORTH FIGHTING FOR!! _

 

Why isn’t that worth fighting for? 

 

_ BECAUSE I WOULD RATHER BE UNHAPPY AND SAFE THAN HAPPY AND UNSAFE  _

 

How do you know that you’re safe? 

 

_ I CAN CONTROL WHAT HAPPENS TO ME!!!!  _

 

How do you know that you’re safe? 

 

_ BECAUSE IF I DO CERTAIN THINGS BAD THINGS WON’T HAPPEN!! _

 

But doing those things never keeps those things from happening. 

 

_ I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW  _

 

If you know that, then why do you keep doing them? 

_ THERE’S NO HARM IN TRYING JUST IN CASE IT’S JUST A LITTLE THING IT’S JUST A LITTLE THING AND EVEN IF IT DOESNT WORK THERES NO HARM IN DOING SUCH A LITTLE THING THERES NO HARM IN IT THERE’S NO HARM IN DOUBLE CHECKING THERE’S NO HARM IN TRIPLE CHECKING THERE’S NO HARM IN WASHING MY HANDS THERE’S NO HARM IN AVOIDING THE NUMBER 3 THERE’S NO HARM IN IT THERE’S NO HARM JUST IN CASE I CAN CONTROL THE THINGS AROUND ME THERE’S NO HARM IN IT THERE’S NO HARM!!!! _

 

If you knew that confessing that you’re gay to your father would hurt you, then why did you do it? 

 

_ BECAUSE LYING IS A BAD THING AND IF I AVOID BAD THINGS THEN WORSE THINGS WON’T HAPPEN!!! _

 

But avoiding bad things doesn’t keep worse things from happening. 

 

_ BUT THERE’S NO HARM IN TRYING  _

 

If you’re unhappy right now avoiding bad things, then what’s keeping you from trying for a better life? 

 

_ BECAUSE MY LIFE COULD BE WORSE THAN IT IS  _

 

Why do you have to settle for a mediocre life where you’re unhappy? 

 

_ BECAUSE I NEED TO EARN MY HAPPINESS.  _

 

Why? 

 

_ BECAUSE I DON’T DESERVE IT!!!!!!!! _

 

Would you tell someone else that they don’t deserve to be happy? Or that they need to earn their happiness? 

 

_ No _

 

Then why would you tell yourself that? 

 

_ I dont know _

 

I love you, Charlie. 

 

_ No you dont you dont you can’t still love me _

I love you, Charlie. 

 

_ Stop saying that _

 

I love you, Charlie. I always did. And I’m still here. I am.

 

_ I can’t risk everything to find you  _

 

You don’t need to go far to find me. 

 

_ I can’t risk everything to find you  _

 

I’m just a plane flight away. 

 

_ I can’t risk everything to find you  _

 

I was only ever just that far away. 

 

_ You can’t possibly have waited for me _

 

I did, though. I waited because I love you. 

 

_ Why did you wait for me?  _

 

Because my life would be better with you in it. 

 

_ Me?  _

 

Yes, you. 

 

_ But I’m scared.  _

  
  
  
  
  
  


Why are you so scared?

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Do you know why the industrial revolution died? 

  
  


Because people found how to do things faster, safer, better. 

 

One can be assured that if gears were alive and could talk they would agree that this was the correct directon of motion; who wouldn’t want to move forward, all things considered? Wasn’t that the goal? 

 

But when you get down to the bottom of it, all it ever was was a matter of replacement. 

 

For better things. 

 

For faster things. 

 

For things that didn’t die of consumption.

* * *

 

And so when everyone surged to the surface- to the upper bunkers, the signalling equipment, and the light and danger- Gears ran down, down, down. He passed all the things in their cages. He passed through doors and floors and padlocks. He went so far that the cold penetrated his skin, and he kept going until he saw it, and then he started running while it chased him down further, because sometimes you just have to get out your "Mars Attacks!" cards and start being realistic.

 

This is a test page. Full sandbox [here](http://scpsandbox2.wikidot.com/thefriendlyvandal).

  
  
  
  
  
  
[ ](http://scpsandbox2.wdfiles.com/local--files/thefriendlyvandaldeepdark/g77)


	4. Ice Floes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was the tale that I started with for this series. I'm putting it here because it makes a few things more clear for The Deep Dark; it even has an actual ending. 
> 
> This was written in 2015. It sucks. What can you do.

 

> _ “If it keeps on rainin’ levee’s goin’ to break _
> 
> _ If it keeps on rainin’ levee’s goin’ to break _
> 
> _ When the levee breaks I’ll have no place to stay.” _
> 
> -Led Zeppelin,  _ when the levee breaks _

Sometimes the site is so quiet you forget that they’re in there.

It feels empty, hollow, like something built without a purpose. Gears finds it interesting how the stainless steel finds such a way to hide its’ true intentions. It’s like a chapel; the Site itself is a place of concentration. Of devout devotion. Of meditation. Of occasional disaster. The flow of containment is fluid, but moves like lovers sharing breath: breaches cause security to tighten, and lack of breaches causes security to lessen until another breach. There is a push and a pull, and those who have been there the longest will feel the peaks and the lows like dogs sense hurricane season.

Vitality. Existance. Bodies produced during winter.

Site-19 is run by a single director and a group of four Level 4 researchers. During the spring and summer, the site is a hub of activity, with a staff of around 2,500 people in an anxious haze that buzzes up the aging concrete walls and shakes the rusted support beams; during the winter, the staff is cut to around 800. Doors are locked. Lights turn off. Cages and labs are locked and shut, and this is the portion of the year referred to as  _ lockdown _ .

If you’re quiet, you can hear it at night, in the deep north Siberian winter- like water in a tide, but only when its empty. The site sways and creaks in the glacier where it sits under chest-high snow and permafrost and temperatures in the -40s, under the blanket of 6-month-long night that chokes and suffocates. Director Jack Bright leaves at the end of the research season- he has a life on other sites, far away from here- and leaves his next in command, the four level fours that have lived there for decades.

They can feel it.

It moves like a tide, the things  _ in there  _ and the things  _ out here _ ; they wake up in the night and listen to the water rush in and out, trapped water pushing against the sand of the beach, rushing in around the bed. They hold their breath and wait to drown, and it never comes.

Sometimes, the water dwindles down to nothing, and you can feel the energy throbbing from the belly of Containment, the fear of repression any further.

It’s a delicate balance. You can walk to the shore and look in, look through iron bars into the long steel hallways locked with red lights and rushing water. You can put your hands in and maybe touch someday.

They’re in there, knee deep in the water, and you’re knee deep on the shore. Something in you wants to go swimming.

You want to touch them, somehow. Touch them and play god.

Charles Gears had not seen the sun in two months.

The Siberian winter that Charlie had come to know so well had long set in, drawing wind across solid ice floes to the south to whip against solitary lamps that swayed against structures in the long, perpetuated night. These guided the few that wandered into the sprawling landscape between Foundation buildings- solid, grey structures, short and stout against endless monotone black and shimmering white, the Foundation owned things, the grey buildings and grey lamps showering grey light on grey snow. In summer, the UV goggles one wore while venturing outside tinted the grey an orange-brown; now, there was nothing but black and grey, and this was simply the way outside looked for upwards of five months of the year.

Gears assumed the world was still there, somewhere beyond the iron fence. He assumed that if you moved far enough in any one direction, there were Cities, and houses and children playing in lush green yards. Logically it made sense that they were there, but Gears had not seen them, not with his own eyes, in many, many years- and Science had taught him not to believe anything, anomalies permitting, that he did not see with his own eyes.

The weekend after graduation and the weekend before starting his master’s, Charlie lay naked, breathing heavy and hot in delight, in the arms of the man he had taken as his partner.

They spent a while just laying there afterwards, staring at the popcorn ceiling of the dorm, taking in the smell of machine oil sticking to each other’s skin. He can’t remember his name- the amnesiacs have long taken their toll- but he remembers the rust-colored hair, how he laughed, the way he kissed him when they were alone. He remembered the glimmering silver robot he had built that impressed him and embarrassed him, the one that moved so smoothly while Charlie wanted to scream in frustration at his own. How they had fallen into each other, so easily, so methodically, under the white beams of the M.I.T. engineering lab.

“ _ Come to Pennsylvania.”  _ He whispered to him finally, his breath easing along his skin.  _ “Come live with me and my family on the farm, they’ll love you, Charlie. Seriously, they will. You can bring your T-88 prototype, I’ll bring my LI-34. We’ll finish them there, you can get your masters’, we’ll figure everything out later. Please.” _

Charlie’s breath hitched in his throat. He loved him. He loved him more than anything else.

But his father’s voice was louder, the words he knew he would say,  _ no fucking queers in my house,  _ and he felt the pain in his eye where he would punch him, and he would yell, and there would be more fighting, and he would be thrown onto the pavement outside, and Charlie debated this for a moment,  _ how much do you love this man? Do you love him more than your family will hate you if they knew? _

He thought about the lesbian couple that had their car windows smashed in last month. How the red-haired man had pounded on his door in a panic after finding T-88 broken on the counter, after thinking that people had found out (it had fallen from the shelf, and Charlie had, in fact, been okay). About how careful they were. About the people that had slurs spray painted on their equipment because they brushed hands with another man. And then he thought, again, about his father, and how he would be hit and thrown onto the road outside of his house, the door slammed behind him, his mother crying, and thought.

He lay paralyzed  _ (he felt the other man’s nose nuzzle his neck affectionately, waiting for his answer, felt tears in his eyes) _ inhaled the smell of LI-34’s short circuit from the lab earlier that evening one last time  _ (I’m so sorry, I love you so much, you are the world to me) _ ; and then left the next morning, without a word, before the red haired man woke. There were missed calls, people were looking, and he packed a backpack and took a train, thought, came back. The red haired man had to go back home the next day. He had taken the message. He left.

He thinks that he cried afterwards, but can’t remember it well  _ (the feelings are muted, grey, monotone, like noise gathering on a VHS tape). _

He would not have another partner between then and the present day.

* * *

 

_ Like a radioactive element, you are always in a state of decay; reaching your half life, disintegrating downward, downward, splitting into two people- the person who feels and the person who does not-and letting the person who does fall away into empty air. Shed it like a skin. Let it peel away and leave you raw. It’s okay; you had it coming. Some would say you’re evolving. You feel like you’re half the person you used to be. _

_ (Sometimes you wish you had gone to Pennsylvania with the man with the soft laugh who took care of you when you were sick and brought you coffee every morning) _

_ You are unstable, Charlie, a bugged program (T-88). You cannot sustain yourself like this. Not forever. _

_ You have no safety net (Black eye, broken nose, shoulder hitting driveway, ‘No fucking queers in my house’).  You get sicker every day (Corrosive; Acidic. Someone didn’t clean up their station). _

_ Push it back. Push it back. That’s not your job. Don’t think about it. _

_ Focus, Charlie. _

_ Get back to work. _

_ \----- _

When his father had hit him, hit him, hit him, hit him, hit him with the hard metal of the fireplace tongs when he was 11, hit him onto the floor and kept hitting him, fragile bones and hard linoleum, Charlie let himself go blank and limp like a rag doll. He rested his head on the floor and locked his eyes straight ahead and said nothing, did nothing. And when his father grabbed the hair on the back of his head and rammed it into the dining room table, Charlie simply allowed himself to pass out rather than feel blood run down his face and bruises forming on his body.

So when the soldiers with their guns and boots and blood smell came into the E-45 robotics lab on a few days after the Christmas of 2016, Dr.Gears, North Eastern Regional Research Director, did not run as was his assistant's instinct. He allowed himself to become blank, submissive, a rag doll on the floor off to the side, and when Dr.Iceberg realized that he was not in tow and the soldiers got closer, picking their way over shattered beakers and bodies, he dropped to the ground and lay still and empty, too, and those that wronged them assumed them dead, at least for the moment, as Gears' father had done long ago.

* * *

 

ice floe

noun

  1. a large flat mass of floating ice.



* * *

 

Gears was aware that Alto Clef was what those not in the anomalous sciences would call something along the lines of  _ spiritually inclined _ ; that he had, to some degree, a  _ ‘third eye’. _ A relativly typical vetran of a long, endless line of teams and task forces in the GOC (and several in the Foundation), Clef was old, short, fat, and walked with a heavy limp with the use of a cane- the injury that had pulled him out of his active career altogether in the mid-eighties, and drove him to the Foundation.

To outsiders, Clef was obnoxiously normal, lively old man. He saw people that didn’t know him well try to pick him apart and place what made him different, scanning him with their eyes from half a room away. But the scars that criss crossed his body weren’t what made Alto special, not the PTSD that sent him limping down the halls at 3AM to check that reality was there, not the obnoxious behavior or the frantic, incoherent way he taught lectures on hume theory and field negotiations.

Alto was what those  _ in  _ the anomalous sciences would call “Hume sensitive” or “Psychically gifted”.

Wether he was born with this gift or trained into it, Charlie wouldn’t know; but once or twice a year Alto would wake from sleep very alert and very awake, and would very deliberately call him and Rights and Mann together and say in a way that wasn’t like him  _ “Something is very wrong, something is going to happen.” _

They would write on the  _ official  _ breach reports, then, that they knew to start lockdown because of computer malfunctions, or something like that, not because Alto had come into the state of mind where he limped along very deliberately and spoke in a hushed tone with a purpose. Alto was never wrong when  _ ‘that feeling’,  _ as they called it, came over him. When Alto shifted into that, he was an entirely different person, and Charlie could see the old task force routines shaking off spider webs and coming to life wholly, vividly, in the way he suddenly watched everyone and checked everything and sometimes put his hands flat on the table and closed his eyes and breathed deep,  _ in for five, out for five, describe the material, easy now, come back down, Alto, take your medicine _ .

It could be hours, or days, or weeks beforehand. Once, it was minutes. But afterwards, the results were the same: something would go horribly, horribly wrong, and they would clean it up and get everything stable and Clef would meander into the Level 4 bunks and crash for days like it had drained him, and they let him, because he did his job and did it very, very well.

They generally tried to evacuate Alto along with the others when a breach happened, because Alto couldn’t run and depended on a cane to walk. They assumed that he could run if he needed to, but not for long. And Alto knew this.

But Alto stayed on the top floors with them and the rest of the task forces under his control.

_ “Come out here, you little shit.”  _ Called Alto, catchpole throwing itself hard against the sides of the storage freezer with a loud  _ BANG BANG. “Won’t fuckin do this again, fucker.”  _ Unlike the task team that trailed behind him, he wasn’t dressed in full-out gear; helmet, kelvar. No shield, no shin guards, no armor. Hawiian shirt. Catchpole. Cane.

_ BANG BANG BANG _

_ “Come out, you little shit.”  _ Gears expected Clef to be bowled into the metal storage rack behind him and mauled, but the attack he expected never came- Cold heat from their breath fogged the metal of their helmets, and Charlie shifted in the safety gear uncomfortably, Kelvar brushing sweat and armor. He wasn’t used to wearing this kind of protection outside the lab.

Twelve hours.

They’d been in lockdown for twelve hours.

Gears ached and hurt, and he could tell Clef was wearing down, too- the way he leaned heavier on his cane, favoring his left leg more, his pace slowing. Tomorrow would be rough for him, as Gears predicted, but that didn’t matter right now. They were running on adrenaline.

_ BANG BANG BANG  _ clickclcicclllcickllc

Alto’s eyes narrowed towards the scrabbling. The men behind him moved quickly and quietly into position, and Gears fumbled with his tranquilizer gun.  

_ The world is different now, it just is. _

He can get married now.

Gears wasn’t one to follow the news; there was never any time. But he noticed when the labs were louder, and people were happy, and there were people (people like him, but different, younger, more open, happier) kissing, hugging.

_ You can come out now, the world is different. _

He doesn’t know how. He buried it deep inside when he was very young and decided he could never say anything to anyone.  _ It’ll destroy your career, everyone will hate you. Loving other men is a laughably horrible cause for embarrassment; it is wrong, you are broken.  _ This was the way he was raised.

_ No one would want you, anyway. _

It was best not to gamble at these things, he decided, and went back to work.

* * *

 

It writhed on the ground on three stumps of flesh, screaming, wiggling its bleeding body out of 914’s output chamber. The blood smeared on the ground, it’s eyes hung from it’s head by the veins in the back, swaying back and forth, back and forth, crying, dragging, orange fabric hanging from tatters of lumped skin.

Dragging forward, forward, stumbling, sliding; he was frozen in place, watching. He had a firearm, of course. He should have shot it, or let the guards shoot it, his colleges shoot it, but they all stood there, watching, dumbstruck. They didn’t know what they had expected to happen;

Gears let it drag forward, penis dangling on the floor behind it.

He called for medical.

It lived like that for two days before Gears let it die.

The level four dorm itself was relatively small and neglected compared to the other dorms and living arrangements on-site, and given that it was only built to house six people- a quota never met, as there was only four of them and occasionally Bright in the summers- it didn’t really matter so long as it was functional. There was a kitchen, a single bunk bed style barrack with six beds (three of them shared by Mann, Rights, and himself, and a fourth claimed by Alto), a bathroom with a shower, and a small living room easily dwarfed by any of the other staff lounges on-site. There was a 22-inch blocky TV plugged into a VHS player and a yellowing Super Nintendo, complete with a copy of  _ Star Fox  _ labeled with messy sharpie. The VHS library was limited to a somewhat ironic variety of titles:  _ Fright Night, Poltergeist, The Shining, The Evil Dead  _ (both one and two) _ , A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Thing, Cujo,  _ a copy of  _ Silence of the Lambs  _ played by Alto on an almost unending repeat, and a single neglected copy of  _ Seinfeld,  _ all stacked haphazardly on a shelf underneath. Gears’ chair- an ugly red plaid armchair muted by years of subtle abuse- sat in one corner, a squeaky rocking chair in the other, and a baige sectional in the middle generally occupied by Alto to some degree. The most attractive part about this room was the high-powered space heater shoved to the wall and occasionally pulled into the bedroom when temperatures outside dipped below -30 degrees Celcius, when the heating started to blip in and out in the nights.

But it was nice. Homey. There was carpeting on the floor and blankets to use, food in the fridge, clean clothes and a bed to crawl into, sleeping pills and bandages behind the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t that bad, Gears reasoned, even if the positioning was a little nerveracking. Their dorm was the closest to the active site, being two levels below the lowest containment level, and the waryness showed- three locks on the front door and two more on the bedroom door, ammo and extra pistol in the medicine cabenet, metal baseball bat in Agatha’s dresser and his own semiautomatic slipped within arm’s reach of his bed.

If something breached without setting off an alarm, whoever was here would be the first to know.

The spell of normality was broken by the metal front door entering into a grey, subterranean hallway somewhere on the 23 rd level, but for the time being it was okay. It was home. There were clean clothes and a bed he could crawl into, bandages in the medicine cabinet, sometimes even food in the fridge. And the company wasn’t too bad either.  

_ “Why are you crying?” _

_ “She lost the baby.” Agatha popped open a beer on the edge of the table, (27 days to winter lockdown), leaving another faint groove in a mosaic of half moons embedded in the wood. _

_ “I do not understand. I believe you said she had carried the child to near term.” _

_ “She did. Ten hour labor.” _

_ “And she lost the child?” _

_ Agatha took a long, hard swig of alcohol, and looked him in the eyes. _

_ “God fucking lord in heaven, Charlie, it ate itself right there in the crib.” _

The sun is setting behind the freezing sea.

Gears takes a moment from his work to gaze out the bay windows of lab seven, the one facing the north. The caribou bay below- he sees their shadows moving like ghosts over the hard, Siberian ground.

Russia.

Gears had not been back to America in close to two decades. Technically, he still held citizenship. Nothing stopped him from returning to his home country where they spoke the English he had been raised in and watched the Iditarod from the streets of his Alaskan hometown, excited, watching big, powerful dogs lunge over swaths of snow like birds flying through the looming, dark mountains. Like streaks in endless white. The sled dogs on-site were working animals, still lean and strong like those he had watched intently in his childhood, but they were also Russian dogs; creatures of a strange breed of tradition. Large, up to a man's waist. The ones bred for patroling the endless fences and pulling sleds of Task Force equipment. The ones with the big, glimmering teeth that were fed with raw meat mixed into preformance dog food and wrapped in bulletproof harnesses and chains.

These were not the Alaskan dogs.

The American dogs were sleek, fast, powerful like horses. They ran like no other and pulled sleds over pristine landscapes like brushstrokes on a painting. They were drawn to the Alaskan wilderness and showed it in how they howled with breathless excitement while they ran, feet pounding on permafrost and ice through special boots, tounges catching snowflakes. One year, when their town had been used as a pit stop, one of the competators had invited Charlie to pet one, and he had, and it had felt like petting a tiger, a panther, heart drumming through warm muscles and leather harnesses, and he had watched them take off across the water of the bay like dancers, breath making puffs of snow. The sun was rising on the freezing sea.

Day -1

Time 08:00

Temperature: -40 degrees C

 

The morning of the first major snow of the season, Gears dreams about the red haired man, the warm weight of his sleeping body curled with his own, and the strange, alien comfort of intimacy.

_ Are you lonely? _

He is not. 

* * *

 

> Day -1
> 
> Time 22:00
> 
> Temperature: -40 degrees C

 

Agatha Rights awakes in a cold sweat and thinks oh god, oh sweet god, don’t do this to us. The hair rises on the back of her neck and she is so frightened she is frozen there on her shitty dorm bed, unable to move. The site creaks and groans in the permafrost 23 floors above where she lays. There is no reasoning; there is no cue. She feels the weight, the pressure of...she doesn’t know, but it hurts her chest and makes it hard to breathe. The feeling of the rush of tide to the levee walls. 

 

Agatha shuts her eyes tight and prays to the silent siberian god. Please don’t do this to us. Please, sweet god, whatever you do. Don’t do this to us. She thinks about the ID badge on her nightstand printed with ACTING DIRECTOR in big red letters across the top and wishes for the first time in the 11 years she’s had this winter position that it wouldn’t be her’s. 

 

The first blast is muffled, but it shakes the bed and the walls and the old iron husk that formed this god forsaken place, and she’s running down the hallway with her semiautomatic and her ID by the second blast that throws her against the hallway wall as the beams list and creak, thinking oh sweet god, please don’t do this. Please don’t do this to us. 

 

But there is no siberian god.

* * *

 

> Day 0
> 
> Time 00:00
> 
> Temperature -40 degrees C

They have given you the task of stemming the tide.

They have given you not bricks, but rocks, and told you to build a levee. You build with them, and they are ill fitting; the water leaks through, and some nights you fear it won’t hold. Some nights it doesn’t, and this will happen, and in this case it is your job to swim, to tread water, to breathe.

On the nights that it floods, your job is damage control. Sandbag, get the water out. Some people will drown when the water comes in, and others will scream when their head breaks the surface; you know better. Screaming is a waste of breath. Screaming is the first mistake, and crying is the second. The currents will rip you out to sea if you do not keep your wits about you.

The breaching of the levee is a certainty of the universe. Containment is temporary; the universe flows from more to less entropy.

You can touch the water, but do you want to?

Containment is but a perceived priority.

Damage control.

You will be thrown in the water.

You will one day be thrown in the water and be expected to swim as others drown under the weight of the sea. One day, you will not surface, and your clothes will catch against the barbed net under the waves, the bobbing sensors glowing red in solidified ice. You will not surface, but someone else will. They will take your place as the person in charge of damage control.

There are bodies in the ice floes, far out off the shore, far off from the levee. The wind sweeps them against the chest-high snow and monochrome world at night. The site breathes and the water laps. Sometimes, you think you can touch them, touch them and play god.

It’s cold out there. He breathes and walks. It's cold out there. There is no help. It's cold out there. The snow comes down in soft flurries and settles on his blood-stained snowgear, he has not eaten in days. It's cold out there. The sun is rising over a frozen sea for the first time in six months and is obscured by the sharp outline of chain links, barbed wire, electric fencing. It's cold out there. He does not know where he is anymore. It's cold out there; something screams in the distance, a great, unholy shreak of something wild that you cannot keep behind closed doors and thick walls. The endless white fades in and out of his vision. It's a cold sunlight. He thinks of the red haired man again and thinks of how they went to see the sleek American dogs charging down a dog sled road lined with LED lights and christmas trees and how he had never seen them before and was in awe because that was just how he was, so pleased by simple things, he was so happy that he was enjoying it, so happy that he had not seen his father or mother on this trip to his home, so happy that he was standing with the red haired man in a place outside the fences and ignorant of the world. He holds this thought tightly as a reminder of why he's walking to fix the fence to fix the fence to fix the fence. They had gotten coffee and suck into an alleyway between two shops and kissed where no one could see them. They sit on a bench as the cold sun rises and they watch the dogs come in and he tells the red haired man that they need to go see the Iditarod this year.

When he reaches the breach point, Charles Gears thinks about the red haired man and fumbles with the tool kit and finds the broken chain link and starts to pinch wires back together, one by one by one by one, folding into brittle diamonds. He holds what he remembers about outside close because it warms him. Something may be following him but he does not work quickly, instead focusing on making sure it's done right, well, throughly. He stands in the tank tracks in the snow and clips them one by one as the wind numbs his world. He thinks about the red haired man in a haze; he has not slept in days. He thinks about Jack Bright with his backpack and coat on in their last Level 4 meeting before the winter, all of them there, Everett, Agatha, Alto. Jack is supposed to go over procedure but he knows he doesn't need to and they sit and drink coffee and talk instead and when it's time for Jack to board the flight to Moscow he hands Acting Director Agatha Rights his emergency override keys, except he doesn't.

He doesn't.

Jack Bright forgets and leaves his emergency override keys in his backpack. He will not remember them until he is sitting in a humanoid containment chamber, and their presence will come upon him all at once, a sudden, pointless weight of realization of a simple mistake. He will scream in frustration and rage and scream until he's too tired to scream anymore. He will fall onto the cot and cry.

_ Are you lonely? _

When he is done, Gears realizes he is standing on the inside of the fence.

_ Are you lonely? _

Since when did it matter, he asks no one. It's strange to hear his voice and stranger to hear it in Russian, but he does not fully remember his native tongue; it feels as if it has been shaken from him in the past three months, shaken from him and covered in soot and ash until all he remembers is the heavy language of metal and Slavic runes. Since when did it matter? He has forgotten his own voice, his Russian voice, himself and it comes out of his mouth and hits the snow and dissipates into nothing. It never mattered, he says in the tongue that the Siberian plains and cold metal walls gave him. His father had taught him that.  _ I hit you because it will make you stronger. I hit you to teach you that you are nothing, and this will benefit you in a place of no grass and endless cold. I hit you because you are weak, weak, weak, and when you are older you will go to college and throw everything I beat into you to the wind and fall in love with another man and it will hurt, too, and you will get you Master's and Doctorate and will feel nothing, and you will go to work at the Foundation and feel nothing, nothing, nothing, because feeling empty will benefit you in that place. To do your job, Charlie, you will need to be steadfast. When the levee breaks, you should know how to swim. You must be cold. And if you are good, Charlie, and if you survive, then when I die, I will give the 05-1 position to you, and it will be the only thing you will ever do worth anything. _

Charlie stood at the fence in the March of 2017 with the world fading in and out of focus and the cold permeating his skin through his coat and for the first time he wonders if he even wanted to become an Overseer. It occurs to him that maybe, it was okay to feel, and feeling didn't impact one's ability to perform in the Foundation at all. It occurs to him that his father did those things to him because he wanted to, not because it was for his own good. Maybe, he could undo some of the links on the fence- pull them back just a little, one by one- and could close them up carefully behind him, and he could walk away. They would assume he was dead, and so would his father, watching from the Overseer council. He could walk, walk, walk until he found the red haired man with the warm weight against him, and could walk back into his arms and the safety and ignorance of the outside world where they could watch the dogs run in the snow and maybe even hold hands in public. He could walk back into the valley behind the levee and live a blissful existence pretending that they were on high ground.

* * *

 

But when the helicopter lands near him and 05-7 stands at the opening and examines Charles Gears from a distance- filthy, covered in blood, exhausted, dehydrated and malnourished, clothing torn and ragged, hypothermia setting in, armed with a backpack of tools and containment logs and guns, rotting meat he's been eating for days out of necessity- Charles Gears stands and limps towards the helicopter in a strange, alien haze. She speaks to him in English at first, and he does not understand her; the words are familiar, but they hold no meaning. He stares blankly at this woman he's seen only on video calls and she speaks slowly to him, one word at a time, again, in English, and he looks at her with a vauge look of tired frustration because he does not know this language anymore, he has lost this language somewhere in February. He feels unreal. He tells her in the Russian he knows that he does not understand her, and her assistant speaks back in heavily American accented Russian, your father is dead, Charlie, we're so sorry.

He stands knee deep in the snow, processing this information. Gears nods and blinks, and turns around- part of him doesn't think the interaction is real, just a hallucination- but 05-7 speaks to her assistant and the assistant says back in the words Gears knows  _ You need to come with us, you're being promoted _ .

He turns back around to face them, looks at them with a neutral look of disbelief and exasperation. There's a third person with them- a medic, a man in white snow gear with a red cross stitched in the side- and Gears only fully registers his presence when he, too, is knee high in the snow, one hand on his shoulder, saying something he can't understand in English and pushing him gently towards the helicopter.

I have to stay, he says. I have to stay here. He says it in Russian, and the medic clearly doesn't understand him, but Gears is pressing backwards, against his hand and his look of sympathy, I have to stay here. I have to. I have to stay. The words slur out of his mouth over and over, and the little woman assistant speaks this back to 05-7 in English, I have to stay. I have to stay. I have to stay here. I need to stay here. It's a prayer, something from deep inside of Gears that he didn't know existed, saying  _ this is all I have, this is all I am, I need to stay, please, I need to stay,  _ and when the Medic pulls on his battered coat again he drops to his knees and pleads out  _ I can't just leave it here _ .

You're delirious, says the little woman in Russian. We're going to take you to a hospital until you're well enough to be sworn in properly, but it's in our power to inform you that you have been selected for the title of 05-1.

Please, he begs. Please, I can't just leave.

A second medic walks past the little woman and goes to the other side of Gears, and the two of them put their arms under his armpits and lift him up, and Gears' words are breathless, hysterical, possessed, he drags his feet in the snow and whispers frantically, composure slipping, everything slipping, and when they force him down onto a gurney in the back his breath comes faster and hitches, he starts to sweat, fear is an unfamiliar emotion and when it floods the numb hole in his stomach that has been there for decades it drives him into frenzy, fighting the restraints, the oxygen mask, the scissors cutting away at his snow gear, the IV and heart monitor. He's injected once, twice, three times, the world is growing sleepy and his limbs are heavy and his chest tight with a kind of potent, overwhelming anxiety that he's never experienced before, the door closes and the plane lifts off and he lets out a kind of desperate, primal cry that he barley recognizes as his own, one of the medics holds his arm down and gives him another injection, and all at once Gears feels himself crashing, falling, unable to move, vision blurring and breath slowing,  _ you're very sick, Charles, just relax _ .

The sun is up over light flurries of snow, over elk and a frozen sea. All that Charles Gears knows is reduced to a husk of ash. The world tells him to sleep, and Charlie fights it, fights it, fights it, watching out through the windows at passing tundra and permafrost and clear, cold sky with a terrible sense of neglected duty, of abandonment, like being torn from a child or from a red haired man he once loved.  

But it doesn't matter.

05-1 is asleep by the time they fly out and over the slowly shifting ice floes of a cold, broken levee. They fly over it where smoke rises and gathers in endless air. They fly over broken chambers and silent places with cold bodies. They fly into open sky like swimming up from open water, and 05-1 is asleep long before they pass over the fence on the opposite side of the facility and are gone into the outside world.


	5. all houses burn (we're taking steps)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a conglomeration some assorted snippets. 
> 
> It should be noted that the following doesn't really make sense. Don't dwell on it too much.

The conference room is paneled in wood, although most of it is out of the frame of the camera on the stream. At the front, several monitors are set up for a time more important than this one, for more important people than inhabit and use them now; from a different time, back when people stood around the room and threw safety rules back and forth and tried to decide what they would do, say, if there was a breach at Site-19, or if there was a mutiny, or if, say, there was an attempt at the end of the world. 

JACK BRIGHT enters the room (stage left). He is flanked by two guards that leave to stand outside once they have him chained to the table, where he sits with the camera on him, pale, fearful, accepting. THE READER will note that this is where Jack Bright’s psyche begins to take it’s most dramatic decline, in these interviews over the next several days. It will conclude with the overseer vote for his containment; it’s for this reason that the days he spends in this state, prone in front of both the ethics committee and the overseer council, are symbolic in a way JACK has not experienced before, Icarus lying bound before god. He is introduced in these days in the March of 2017 to true, all-consuming grief. 

The last time JACK BRIGHT will leave this site in a body is when he goes to visit the wreckage himself, but this will be addressed later. 

CENTER STAGE: On screen is DIRECTOR AMALI WISTUBA, a dark-skinned muslim woman in her late fifties. She leads THE ETHICS COMMITTEE with the kind of skill possessed by a surgeon knitting bone- direct, but not careless; aware of her position, but not overly proud. She used to hold a similar position to CHARLES GEARS (✝) as head of research in the southeastern hemisphere before her current occupation. She worked with him, not long ago. It is the palpable but distanced grief of losing someone you saw only in passing, the breaking of an assumption of their existence that is ignorable, yet disturbing. WISTUBA will not discuss this grief in detail. It is not her place. 

On the screens to her left and right, the OVERSEER COUNSEL watches absentmindedly; it is not completely necessary for them to watch these proceedings, nor will their decision to contain JACK BRIGHT be the hardest nor the most important one they will make in their time of service. The most notable of these figures, as THE READER should note, is 05-6, MIKELL BRIGHT, a grey-haired man with cold eyes. The relationship he has with JACK BRIGHT is rocky at best, but he does his best to be present, and to be neutral. He owes it to his brother; he owes at least this much. 

This will not stop him from voting for his containment in the end. 

JACK has a growing audience now; the ETHICS COMMITTEE has signed on this conference call as well, one by one, along with the remaining OVERSEERS. He avoids their gaze as they talk amongst themselves. 

The PROCTOR INTERVIEWER enters the room. His name is unknown; it is not in his place for this name to be known. He is a young man with dark hair who sits between JACK and THE ASSEMBLED, placing a recording device on the table between them and turning it on, placing a binder on the table. He nods at JACK with a neutral expression. THE ASSEMBLED focus their attention on CENTER STAGE. 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: May the record show before starting that SCP-963 will be referred to as JACK BRIGHT for the duration of the following interview logs. JACK, I’m assuming you are aware that as an SCP, you possess the rights of a humanoid anomaly in place of a human for the sake of these proceedings. 

JACK BRIGHT: I understand. 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: If the committees in attendance have nothing to add, then, we’ll begin. 

The PROCTOR INTERVIEWER opens the binder. 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: May the record show that the interviewee is DR.JACK BRIGHT, aka SCP-963. Up until the events of January 1st, 2017, subject was the long time Director of Site 19 in northern Siberia. Subject was off-site when the event took place. These interviews are being conducted not just to determine blame, but to establish a testimony as to the unfolding of these events in the months that followed the breach itself. JACK- do you have anything to note before we begin?

JACK BRIGHT: Is this on record?

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: Yes. 

JACK BRIGHT: Alright. In that case, fuck you. 

* * *

 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: When did you meet CHARLES GEARS (✝)?

JACK BRIGHT: Shit. About...must have been before the mid-eighties. He worked for me about thirty five years in total, I think. He was finishing his doctorate when I sent him up to Siberia. 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: Why did you pick him? 

JACK BRIGHT: He’s...I mean, he was...he was a good guy. Worked really hard, real stickler for detail, deeply devoted to his work. 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: Were you aware of any mental health conditions when you chose him for the Site 19 Senior Research team?

JACK BRIGHT: What, you mean like shit that would make him shoot up the place?

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: Anything at all. 

JACK BRIGHT: He was cleared for duty. I never asked him about anything like that, and he never told me anything about that. Gears was always- you know. He was Gears, he was always like that, but he seemed healthy. 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: Any obsessive behaviors?

JACK BRIGHT: Look, the poor guy’s probably dead. You don’t need to hide the fact that you’re probing me for his mental health history. 

PROCTOR INTERVIEWER: Do you know anything about his mental health history?   
  
JACK BRIGHT: Nothing that I’m willing to tell you. 

 

* * *

 

Clef had to laugh when people tried to fix up Charlie, because Charlie was a force of nature not to be touched, not to be spoken to, something cold and unable to be moved, something like cracked stone-- unstable, but did it matter? Unstable, but unlikely to diminish in your lifetime? Unstable, but would you touch him, could you touch him, could you try to find the fault lines in hard white linoleum and cold eyes and screens, molten steel in forgeries, pacing feet at 1AM? In chat logs and dark hallways? Labs? Offices? Meetings? Could you keep up with him? Could you stop him?  

 

No. 

 

Charlie lived in his own domain, and that meant that he was not something to be fixed.

* * *

_ When the Steel Place was to be built the shamen on the shore spoke to the men crossing the ice with sleds of diggers, and said _

_ The islands there are holy, holy, holy.  _

_ The lights dance upon them in the polar nights,  _

_ The animals crawl there to die.  _

_ When you build the Steel Place  _

_ You will build upon cursed ground.  _

_ And the men asked her,  _

_ To which god is it holy? _

_ And the shamen said,  _

_ Ah,  _

_ It is impossible to tell to whom a blessing lies,  _

_ Or to which god it is protected.  _

_ And the men said, _

_ We will continue to build the Steel Place.  _

_ And the shamen said,  _

_ As you wish,  _

_ And left hoof marks on packed snow  _

_ Under clear spring skies _

_ And the caribou followed behind her. _

_ Stranger things have happened,  _

_ By falling through the cracks _

_ At the break of dawn. _

 

* * *

 

If i was a brave man, 

I would take the stars and the moon for you. 

I would become impenitrable. 

I would fall and not break, 

And no one could ever touch us. 

__

But i am not a brave man, 

And i would rather have life pass me by

Then be brave at all. 

__   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


(where did all your love go?)

into databases and containment chambers and 

(where did all your love go?)

journal articles and peer reviews and data loggi

(where did all your love go?)

ng and quarantine cages and laboratories and p

(where did all your love go?)

aperwork and chemical orders and fluorescent li

(where did all your love go?)

ghts and sleepless nights and endless days and 

(where did all your love go?)

rewrites and doing it again because it wasn't go

(where did all your love go?)

od enough and meticulous calculations and ther

(where did all your love go?)

e is no love left because i gave it all to cold soli

(where did all your love go?)

d things that I can touch and feel and feel safe 

(where did all your love go?)

holding instead of warm soft things that could gi

(where did all your love go?)

ve back the love i gave because in sheer numb

(where did all your love go?)

ers would i rather save millions with my work or

(where did all your love go?)

just one by coming out?

__   
  


(is all your love gone now Charlie?)

(are you too old now to change it?)

(would anyone love you?)

(could you love anyone?) 

(do you still love your work like you used to?)

(how long will you be living like this?)

(does it really matter?)

(could you still function in the same manner if you loved something else?)

__

(do you want a partner?)

i don't know.

(do you remember what it's like to love someone?)

I don't know.

(what if you can't find anyone willing to love you and everyone hates you and you're left to die alone without the thing you've been loving unconditionally for the past 30 years?)

I don't know.

(does the end justify the means?)

I don't know.

(Are you willing to proceed if you have so many unknowns?)

I don't know. 

__   
  


(promise you'll come out.)

okay.

(set a date.)

this spring I will.

(pick a date or you won't do it)

which date do I pick?

(aren't you notoriously meticulous with your schedules? how could you not be able to strategically pick a date?)

i don't know how to plan for this.

(it's just like anything else important, isn't it? treat it like treated your doctoral defense.)

I don't think it's  _ that  _ important. 

(is it important to you?)

that doesn't make it important.

(yes it does. something that's important to you should be just as important as something in your work life. was your dissertation important to you?) 

Of course it was.

(then it should be important. pick a day. you don't have to put it in the electronic calendar. just write it in your planner.) 

how should I do it? how does this work?

(call a meeting. maybe just the other level 4s at first, they're the people you're closest to.)

i wasn't aware this was so formal.

(well, it's usually not. but it's important, isn't it? 

* * *

When you walk a thousand miles to feed the thousand mouths, you will take a shower in the early hours of the deep cold morning in the level 25 lab lockers and remember his voice, his aftershave, the contour of his neck, the bit of fat that he was embarrassed by and tried to hide from you, how he held you, the elegance of his doctoral defence, how you envied his research grants and how he teased you about it, his dark skin, his glasses, his hair, his shoes, the spaces between his fingertips and how you touched them when you held hands, your love, your overflowing love that turned into fear when you stepped outside, when he came home late with a black eye, the smell of fire, his funeral. 

__

When you walk a thousand miles to feed the thousand mouths, you will take a shower in the early hours of the deep cold morning in the level 25 lab lockers and remember his voice, the contour of his neck, how he held you, how you envied his research grants and how he teased you about it, his glasses, his shoes, your love, your overflowing love that turned into fear when you stepped outside, when he came home late with a black eye, the smell of fire, his funeral. 

__

When you walk a thousand miles to feed the thousand mouths, you will take a shower in the early hours of the deep cold morning in the level 25 lab lockers and remember the contour of his neck, how you envied his research grants and how he teased you about it, his shoes, your overflowing love that turned into fear when you stepped outside, the smell of fire, his funeral. 

__

When you walk a thousand miles to feed the thousand mouths, you will take a shower in the early hours of the deep cold morning in the level 25 lab lockers and remember how you envied his research grants, your overflowing love that turned into fear, his funeral. 

__

When you walk a thousand miles to feed the thousand mouths, you will take a shower in the early hours of the deep cold morning in the level 25 lab lockers and you will remember how you envied his research grants and your overflowing fear. 

__

When you walk a thousand miles to feed the thousand mouths, you will take a shower in the early hours of the deep cold morning in the level 25 lab lockers and you will remember his research grants in passing. 

__

When you walk a thousand miles to feed the thousand mouths, you will take a shower in the early hours of the deep cold morning of your 57th birthday in the level 25 lab lockers and you will remember nothing, and you won’t care. They will never stop feeding, and you will not attempt to stop them. They will feed at your time, and you will give all of it to them. They will feed at your passion, and you will give all of it to them. They will feed at your emotions, and you will let them eat all of it, all of your love and fear that was overflowing. You will let them take everything; your hate, your sadness, but your happiness, too. It does not hurt once they have eaten the nerves, and then there is only a numb sort of feeling, like losing blood. Once you exit the shower, you will feed them more, heaps of flesh on paper. When the going gets hard and the mouths breach containment, you will give them your teeth, and your tounge, and your lungs. They will call you dedicated, but you are more than dedicated- this is your everything. 

__

One day, when you have no more flesh to give, those who have praised you for feeding the mouths more than anyone else will throw you out on the street and say that you deserve a rest, and you will thank them, and walk a few miles. You will find a good ditch shaded with trees, and you will lie down and let yourself rot, because there is nothing to make you alive. Animals will eat your body. They will say, ah, he dropped off the face of the earth, and you will have become the face of the earth. 

__

And when you go to hell for someone you used to love with such overflowing passion, there will be nothing left for them to take. 

__

So is feeding the thousand mouths. 

* * *

Where did all the love in your body go?

Did you pour it into the things that did not deserve your love? 

Did you put it into one project, 

And then two, 

And then three, 

And more and more and more

Until you were wishing away the minutes, 

hours, 

days, 

weeks, 

Years,

Decades, 

In numbness and apathy,

Who are you?

(Loneliness without love is unconsciousness)

Are you a person?

(Yearning without a subject is pointless.)

Are you broken?

(Yourself without love is depressing.)

You loved until there was no love in your body. 

(You loved all the things that did not need love or care if you gave it)

You loved until what love you had left was bitter, diluted, scraped from the bottom of your heart. 

(You would love anything but yourself and your father.)

Are you going to be like this forever? 

(If you go far enough, will you find it?)

Who took the blood from your body at the pinnacle of dusk?

(Was it you?)

They call you  _ dedicated, Hard working, Motivated,  _ and you like it when they pat you on the head, and like it when they tell you you’re doing a good job, but they tell you these things only because you jump through the hoops

(and pour your love into all the little things you hate that others won’t put their love into.)

It’s cold in the deep dark, Charlie, 

But if you go down far enough-

-If you go down enough flights of stairs-

-If you fall, or trip, or falter- 

-If you never care again-

-if you never find it-

-if you die like this-

It’ll be all worth it, 

because 

No one 

Will ever

Have

To

Know

  
  


About the love that used to be in your body, 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


or who it was really for. 

* * *

 

__


	6. Parting Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regarding things as they are.

SCP taught me how to be a good writer. I started reading it at 13 years old and joined at 15 after two years of SCP roleplay on Tumblr. I fell for it deeply, strongly, willingly, immediately, and I know that many newbies have the same experience today.

"Being Human" was a passion project, or a labor of love, or a mixture of both. It was the thing I dreamed of writing when I joined but could never get away with; I love it still. I'm not sure what I'm going to do now, but I have to move on. I don't want to leave, but I can't stay here anymore. So far the disconnect and initial separation has been going okay, but it feels weird. SCP is in nearly every aspect of my life, and now it's just a problem of erasing it and moving on. 

I've been asked if I'll allow fanart of this work as it is, and yeah, I mean, by all means, go ahead. Even take what I have here and run with it if you want, maybe make it into something malleable for the site. 

Overall, thank you. This community was at my core for five or six years of my life and it will always hold a special place in my heart. It's been a pleasure writing with you all. 


End file.
